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caprica99 · 3 years

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Shadow and Bone rant, because I need it

Shadow and Bone has some incredible potential, both the books and the show, but neither actually lives up to it.

Alina could have been interesting. Cartographer is a rare profession for fictional characters, but in the books/show she's just a beginner (at 17/20 it's understandable). Make her at least 25 with 9 years of experience in the army, give her a promotion with subordinates she's responsible for and you would get a more interesting character who saw some serious shit in the army, acts like a soldier, and knows responsibility. (And maybe wants to stop the war at all cost, utilizing the Fold maybe.*wink, wink*)

It bothered me that we never saw her using cartography this profession that makes her unique for reaching her goals. In the show, she has dreams about the stag. It would have been interesting to see HER figuring out the whereabouts of the stag by using the stag's surroundings like mountains, specific types of trees, topography, etc. Work smarter, not harder.

Diana Bishop suffers from the same passiveness in the first book of the All Souls trilogy, but she actively uses her science historian background and those passages are the most interesting parts of her POV. Alina's interest in drawing and geography would give her a unique personality, and made her relatable to many (see ADoW and history nerds). Many YA heroines have a specific and useful skillset: Katniss-archery, Clary Fray-drawing, etc. Sadly, her entire personality is running away with Mal.

Mal's character feels pointless to me. The story depicts an oppressed minority group with special powers, and their struggles in the world, the heroine and the antagonist are both part of the said minority group, and he's constantly shown to be a bigot against the Grisha, so what makes him so important to the plot? His tracking skills? Give the job to a no-name tracker and I wouldn't miss him.

At least the show made him more likable, but Archie and Jessie still lack romantic chemistry. However his chemistry with his friends Mikhail and Dubrov was spot on, I really liked it. They showed life as a simple otkazat'sya soldier on the front, and their death was painful to watch. I thought that his friend's death would make a bigger impact on Mal, him wanting to get revenge on the fjerdans and end the war at all cost, and saying that maybe Kirigan's plan actually makes sense would make an interesting narrative. (They are at war dammit, there's no black and white only grey.)

Mal and Alina don't act like soldiers in a war-torn country, they act like American teenagers, and it's annoying. The General and Ivan are the only ones who act as soldiers in a 3 front war. When the villain shows the most responsibility in your story you should rewrite your heroes completely, or make the villain your hero.

The show is better than the books. It's a rare phenomenon but it is something everyone agrees upon. To me, the first book reads like a draft the author forgot to expand. The worldbuilding, the Grisha, and the characters were a perfect base to an original fantasy universe, but it all falls flat. The show made it richer by introducing multiple POVs and giving the actors more leeway (Ben Barnes ladies and gentlemen). But in the end, they had to stick to the books.

This is incredibly confusing to me because we have numerous fanfictions about Alina staying at the Little Palace, embracing her Grisha side, helping the Darkling because his plan makes sense, or changing his plan by coming up with a better one, or having dark!Alina etc... Clearly, this is what book fans wanted: giving Alina agency, make her realize that she had to work with the Darkling because she's Grisha too and they have the same goals but have different methods, let her be Professor X to Alexander's Magneto, ending the corrupt and incompetent Lantsov line, anything would have been better than taking Baghra's words at face value and running off.

Change I like: the whole West-Ravka storyline, it made the General decision understandable. Zlatan sold Grisha to the fjerdans, wanted to kill Alina and his actions could have led to a civil war, Kirigan only acted as a general of his time (not 21 century guys, we are talking about the unforgiving 19 century) and besides we only see the destruction of Zlatans army (BTW they were ready to kill everyone on the skiff) and not the whole city.

Change I don't like: making Alina half Shu. I'm not completely against it, but it was poorly executed. The racism Alina faces overshadows the Grisha-hate, rather than complementing it. Alina acts like being half Shu is somehow worse than being Grisha, eventough there are literal Holocausts going on against Grisha in two neighbouring countries, slavery in another, and the show never addresses it. This is the biggest problem with her character, she never embraces being Grisha, sides with the muggles, and makes her mission to kill the only person who stands between Grisha and persecution.

Would have been good: the show could have made little 5 minute scenes depicting the plight of Grisha in other countries. Either at the beginning or the end of every episode.

Episode 2: the Ice Court

Episode 3: the Shu concentration camps with the experimenting

Episode 4: slavery in Kerch

Episode 5: the Wandering Isle with consuming grisha blood

Episode 6: the Demon in the Woods storyline

Episode 7: Luda+Aleksander

And now... The Darkling/ Aleksander Morozov/ General Kirigan: the most interesting character in the entire series.

In the first half of SaB he was depicted as every soldier's dream general. Sitting and eating with his men, fighting side by side with them, constantly checking on his troops while other generals prefer to attend court. But in the second half, he transforms into a Mustache Twirling Villain TM and makes rather OOC decisions throughout the trilogy. He could have been a generic villain from the start, but why make him then a compelling character with understandable motivations?

In the books, I understood his motivations, but in the show, he was completely right. His backstory shows that he tried peaceful tactics but those never worked out. The only thing that worked against his enemies was power and violence. The price of hesitance was Luda's life (I'm willing to bet they were married). The Fold was actually a mistake born from desperation. He spent centuries in hiding, seeing his people persecuted. Even with the Little Palace and the Second Army Grisha are considered second-class citizens, they can't hold properties. He has to walk the fine line between usefulness and being a threat. He has to bow to incompetent Kings who don't give a shit about the state of the country. If Alina had to go through so much how would she end up? Because it's a miracle that Aleksander still has it in him to fight for the Grisha.

Many bring up Nikolai Lantsov as the Darklings foil ( or Diet Darkling as @ambitious-witch calls him) to show there is an alternative to Aleksander, but it's wrong. Because Nikolai was never part of an oppressed minority group, never had to fear centuries of persecution, he's an actual prince, it's easy to not be radicalized with his background.

Bonus: If Bardugo wanted to create a fictional world with tsarist Russia as a base, the least she could have done is to open a Wikipedia page or a dictionary for the correct names and terms. Starkov is a man's name: Alina Starkova is the correct form. Ilya Morozov, Aleksander Morozov, and Baghra Morozova would be the correct forms.

EDIT: They could have shown the building of the Little Palace and the start of the Second Army. I wanted to see the normal life at the Little Palace before Alina came along, little Grisha enjoying their powers, their reaction if the Darkling comes to see their training (I headcanon he visits the lessons at least once a year), the other teachers, and their reaction to Alina. Alina in canon is good with kids, maybe if she had spent time with little Grisha, she could have embraced her powers sooner. Having met with foreigners (Fjerdan, or Shu) and hearing their gruesome accounts of the foreign treatment of the Grisha would made her willing to fight for their future.

#shadow and bone #sab netflix #sab spoilers #grishaverse #anti leigh bardugo #the darkling #alexander kirigan #aleksander kirigan #aleksander morozova #alexander morozova #alina starkov #shadow and bone cast #shadow and bone netflix #darklina #alina x darkling #malyen oretsev

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marcilled · 4 years

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[this is gonna be a big long post about minecraft youtuber drama... press J to scroll past this if you don’t care about that. lol. sorry]

idunno if anybody took my post the other day as me “cancelling dream for cheating in a videogame”, i posted it mostly out of bemusement of the whole situation, and because that video was really well put-together. (context: his 1.16 speedruns were disqualified by the minecraft speedrun.com moderators & there was a video & document explaining why).

I definitely don’t correlate cheating a speedrun w/ ableism, racism, etc etc. I already knew about a lot of nasty shit dream has done, like the video he did with Notch, and how all of his early content was about pewdiepie, just further normalizing those two to his young audience. I’ve always disliked him for those things, which I’ve been aware of pretty much as long as I’ve known of him, and he has never apologized for those things. It’s why whenever I posted about him before (which was... maybe once or twice?), I always say “don’t stan him or anything he sucks”.

I had no idea there was so much more to it honestly. It’s kind of galling seeing the full context now, because whenever I’ve seen any kind of criticism against him, it’s been him presenting it in an apology. I dunno why I wasn’t suspicious of this given what I already knew about him, but the guy seems to be very clever with how he damage controls any sort of possible controversy regarding him. He presents a really heartfelt, honest apology for whatever happened and gives a few cherrypicked examples of things that people said about him and says how wrong he was and how he doesn’t want to alienate his viewers.

The fact that it’s Dream presenting the evidence of his controversies, means that he gets to control how the conversation goes. Instead of a popular “mcyt” stan account getting to control the conversation, pointing out the shit he’s said and done, he addresses it in a livestream, and does not provide the original context. Huh, I wonder why. It’s almost as if he doesn’t want everyone to see that his mistakes are more than just little “oopsies”, it’s him being actively malicious and getting so defensive that he tells off anybody who could possibly disagree with his view of things.

While his actions and words are pretty horrid on their own, I think the thing that has me most concerned about Dream is... He seems pretty fuckin’ good at manipulating peoples’ perception of him.

-----

After the video about his speedruns being cheated came out the other day, he had this to say on twitter (this is his second, “personal” account):

Now, as I said before, cheating in a videogame isn’t at all comparable to racism or ableism. What I’m trying to point out here is his response to any sort of criticism.

The video he’s referring to is this one, published by Geosquare 2 days ago (dec 11th). What’s interesting to note here is how he singles out Geosquare specifically in this tweet. If you click on the video, the first few seconds establishes that it’s a video made by the entire Minecraft java edition speedrunning mod team (which is made up of a team of over a dozen people). The video and document was a true team effort from every single one of them, and it only got posted to Geosquare’s account (& got his narration) because he’s already a youtuber with a pretty comfortable amount of subscribers.

So, instead of pointing his ire (and those of his many, many fans) at the whole speedrun mod team, instead, he points it squarely on Geosquare, so that people have a convenient name to latch onto. He then accuses Geosquare of using his name as “clickbait” in order to get “easy views”, sowing the seed of this idea that Geosquare is doing this in an opportunistic grab for personal gain. If you clicked on the video and saw the description/pinned comment, you’d see that not only did Geosquare disable monetization on the video, he disabled monetization on his entire channel for as long as this drama goes on (and he knew there would be drama, dream made extra sure to threaten the mods with a video of his own in retaliation if they ended up banning him).

Then, in a reply to the first tweet, he says that there are “multiple moderators” messaging him saying the verdict was “biased” and that they may quit the mod team. He provides no evidence for this. However, if you click on the tweet and view any of the thousands of replies from his fans, it doesn’t matter that he gave no evidence, his word is enough. If you’re wondering, Geosquare and a few other mods have stated many times that it was a group decision on their part, and nobody had any question in their mind that Dream must have cheated. So... Dream, who are these “mods” that are messaging you? He won’t say.

Lastly here, I want to point out that in his next tweet on the matter, he makes this very bitter comment about how useless it was for them to investigate a “16th place run”. It’s a minor detail, but I think it’s worth mentioning; this kind of downplays how impressive his run was at the time. At the time he submitted his sub-20 minute speedrun, it was a top 5 run, in a very competitive category of speedrunning the game. In the 2 months since, several people have passed his time using new strats, but that doesn’t diminish the fact it was a pretty amazing “run”... if it weren’t cheated of course. But, I’m just rambling on about how petty I am about him cheating at this point so let me get back to the main point here.

If you see the numbers on these tweets (hundreds of thousands of likes), you’ll understand why this is pretty scary for those speedrun mods. The same day this happened Geosquare joked around “I’ve only gotten one death threat so far!”. Dream’s fanbase is unparalleled in minecraft youtube, and incredibly sizeable for a youtube channel overall. If you’re not familiar with this new wave of “mcyt” minecraft accounts, it’s... it’s pretty much exclusively because of Dream’s fame. He’s the driving force of minecraft youtube content right now. Any youtuber who even breathes near the guy blows up in subscribers & views. His minecraft server, “Dream SMP”, is like... it has a legitimate cultural impact, whether that sentence disgusts you or not. Especially for young gen Z kids.

The point I’m trying to make is, ever since he came onto the scene in early 2019, he’s grown and grown at exponential rates, and I can’t understate the kind of influence he has on not just his own fans, but the fans of like. Pretty much anyone who is plugged in to anything minecraft youtube related right now.

People have discussed this before, but Dream’s sudden rise to fame happened shockingly quick. So quick that it’s almost impossible it were by accident. He’d spent something like a year or two studying how the youtube algorithm works, how famous youtubers grow their popularity, etc. He spent a lot of time studying, and it paid off for him. It makes me wonder if he’s studied how youtubers deal with controversy as well. Because it seems like he’s doing everything right to keep his fans “loyal” to him.

So I think it’s not unreasonable to say that it is pretty goddamn concerning when he reacts to criticism like this. His immense fanbase, who are often worryingly obsessed with him, of mostly impressionable kids... It’s a recipe for disaster, in the hands of someone so entitled and immature.

I think what really has me worried, though, is a video he published to his second channel the other day. Recently, he published a video about his “stans”. The entire video essentially boiled down to him disputing claims that “dream stans” were toxic, or that stanning people or “stan culture” was creepy/unhealthy. He spent a lot of the video comparing stans of content creators to passionate fans of football teams, and expressed repeatedly how he thought it was normal and OK to be totally obsessed with a content creator and engage in “stan culture”, as long as you weren’t being a legitimate stalker. He pretty much only talked about the positives of being a Dream Stan, and how positive the “community” is. The whole video painted this really idealistic image of what it means to be a Stan of a person, and fandom in general.

Now... I don’t know about everyone else reading this, but I found that video to be... incredibly creepy and weird. It completely ignores any actual arguments about how stan culture can be unhealthy, and how engaging so heavily in parasocial relationships can be quite damaging, especially to younger people.

But, mostly? It seemed like the whole video was basically designed just to reinforce the most unhealthy impulses of his stans, and reward them with the positive encouragement that he actually enjoys it when they are obsessed with him so much that they can’t imagine he could ever possibly do anything wrong.

And that? That is fucking dangerous for a person with such a huge fanbase to be peddling to their fans.

Surely, he must know- a great deal of his fans are so obsessed with him, that they think they know him as well as, if not more than, a personal friend. So that when he does something disagreeable and wrong, and he claims “no that’s not how it happened, they’re biased and trying to cancel me because they’re jealous”, they just take that at face value, because why would he lie? He’s so honest and genuine in his videos and livestreams!

This sort of behavior from Dream, along with his tweets I posted earlier, reads to me as if he knows exactly what he’s doing. I think he is purposefully insulating his fans from the truth of his actions, so that he can present this idealistic picture of him in their mind, so that it seems absurd that he would do something wrong.

I think it’s only a matter of time before it comes out he’s done something much worse, honestly. What it is, is hard to say- he’s already done so much that anyone reading this should rescind their support for him, imo. But, I know that none of this matters to his millions of fans. While I worry for them, I also worry for anyone who becomes a target of Dream. I could see this speedrunning drama being the start of a downward spiral for him. Things could get real ugly with all that minecraft clout getting to his head... I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

TL;DR, dream sucks, and not just because he cheats at videogames.

I apologize again for writing a multi paragraph post about a minecraft youtuber. I will not post about this anymore (probably) please do not unfollow me .

#vivi bleats #txt #long post #i might delete this cuz im embarrassed i typed this much about this topic #but idk i already typed it so.#dream

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j10kkuno · 4 years

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On Ash (again)

Hey-so there's stuff going on with Ash again. She's said some racist against Asian COVID related things and the R slur on Discord(This is all stuff from 2018-June 2020). I was going to make a post about it but quite frankly, I got five hours of sleep last night and I don't have the mental capacity nor do I feel like, as a white woman, do I feel like I should try to explain it. I'm going to link the Twitter thread.

She also just did a livestream giving her side of things. I couldn't watch it due to having a session with my therapist at the same time(And my therapist kept mentioning how tired I was) but Twitter made it sound like it was a lot of excuses but that the protests one was anti masker protests.

Like my last On Ash post, I'm going to do a read more for my thoughts.

I'm disappointed in Ash making the Chinese/Asian virus jokes. Like, thinking back to February of last year, on of my biggest worries was that I had a long standing crush on a former professor whose family lived in South Korea(We stayed friendly after our class ended well over a year before then, I saw him on school breaks, long story but we still plan to see each other once it's safe) and since SK was one of the first places hit outside China, was his family okay? Were his in-laws? And Asian people around the globe were facing racism which was so beyond frustrating but I don't wanna dig up bad memories and possibly triggers for people and obviously, at the time, my heart focused on the guy I adored and his family.

And she was joking about bat virus soup and encouraging people saying "corona boy." I get that bats don't look appetizing and I agree entirely but that's when you don't say anything and respect people's culture. I think we've all done it. Especially at a sensitive time like that, you don't joke about that. I'm thinking back to me at that time and imagining someone joking about COVID and it seems crazy. I mean, I was naïve(Edited, the original word was ignorant but that has a negative connotation while I think very few of us had any idea how badly COVID was going to be in the west back in February) and wasn't seriously thinking it was going to hit the US as badly as it did but between Prof C and Kpop, I was thinking and worrying about it to some degree on a daily basis compared to a lot of Americans while she was joking about it and it's just... Have some tact, I think???

(I'm also hesitant to judge the first screenshot because out of context, for all I know she literally had Chinese food and then it didn't sit right in her stomach, like in a food poisoning way and I wouldn't put it past Twitter to twist things against Ash but that's just me).

I won't address the protest thing without seeing her explanation. Her police comment was... Naïve, is how I took it personally. The R slur was completely out of line, and there's no defending it.

However, like last time, as long as Corpse, Sykkuno, and friends keep supporting her, I'll keep supporting her. I'm horrible for that, I think, but that's the truth. I'm going to keep her off this blog for a bit I think, other than maybe a Corpse and Ash post I wanted to make while watching the VOD. Otherwise, I'm going to keep Ash to a very low minimum.

But no, I'm disappointed. I really am. I'm just exhausted and I feel like I don't have the right words to express it. I know my response is probably lukewarm and very white but this is where I'm at. Now I'm just going to go and wait for Uno.

#Ash on lol #Gonna clog the tags to signal boost so if people want to unfollow they can sorry #Sykkuno #Corpse husband #Valkyrae #disguised toast #jacksepticeye #offlinetv and friends #tw: r slur #It's a lot harder to excuse this #I wanted to get a post out on this today #Edit so apparently while I was watching her stream before therapy someone gifted me a sub #That is very awkward #I'm not even happy #Yesterday I would've been overjoyed #This isn't fair #Why couldn't I have gotten gifted a sub during the Rust days???#It feels wrong

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kainumbernine009 · 4 years

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I literally cannot do anything else until I get this out.

I’m... really not okay.

And when I say that, I’m not mentally unstable. I say that because I’m tired of waiting on empty promises, I’m tired of never having money in our account, I’m tired of living in a fucking city where half of the white people fucking worship the ground Trump walks on, and where most of the gay community has so much messy drama that it’s worse than middle school. And I went to a rough middle school.

I never talk about my past, because I don’t like to. It sucked. HARD. Being and only child in my family was nothing less than torture, especially as a closeted queer person. We grew up in the white Christian part of Nashville that dominated Music Row in the 90′s and early 2000′s. I played basketball with Alan Jackson’s daughter, and being around famous people was just no big deal. But, my parents decided to leave Nashville after my dad lost his job at TPAC, and we moved down south an hour to the town where the KKK got started (Pulaski, TN).

I had maybe two non-white people in my private Christian school growing up. I was never afraid of Black people, but my parents showed their racist asses quick when we moved there. The KKK has never left America, guys, no matter how many articles you read or studies you do. From 2005 to 2009 I saw a white town show its very worst to the Black community. I’ll never forget the first time I saw a march for “White Christians for Purity” the summer before Obama got elected. The disgust I felt inside was palpable. I had all kinds of friends in school, and I didn’t give TWO SHITS who they were or what they looked like... but I saw children my age, being brainwashed by their parents, that “white” is “right.”

Ever since then, I have been learning and growing about the issues of race. I remember my white classmates using the N word and getting away with it. I remember hearing about the principal at the high school punishing all the Black kids but not the white kids. I remember being invited to a church south of town that was a historically Black church, and how nice the ladies were to me for coming.

But I’ll never forget the racism that the religious groups promoted there, especially First Baptist Church and the 12 Tribes. I’ll never forget how FBC told me that my friend was going to Hell because she killed herself. I’ll never forget my mom telling me not to marry a Black man because of “impure genes.” I WILL NEVER FORGET THE INJUSTICES I SAW WHITE PEOPLE DOING TO BLACK PEOPLE THERE. NEVER.

And thank God, I have shaken the burden of religious guilt, but I still fight against this mentality. I live in a place that’s usually not even 10 minutes away from Trump-humping, sister-fucking, meth-addicted Confederate cunts in any direction. And we’re even closer to the rich white people who silently supported him, upset that their taxes would go up because of Biden.

And in the past four years since Trump got elected, I’ve gotten married, graduated college with honors, started my own photography business, and was making more than my husband there for a minute. I did my own taxes, marketing, editing, and everything. And then I came out as trans.

I lost everything.

I lost my studio. I lost friends. I had rumors started about me. I had people post hate messages on my wall. I had people at my drag shows tell others not to tip me, for whatever fucking reasons. I’ve had bosses give cis people jobs over me, and I’ve had government workers give me second looks when I hand them my license.

It. Fucking. Sucks. To. Live. Here. Like. This.

Oh yeah, did I mention I’m also a witch/medium? I’ve talked to dead people before and have told their relatives things I shouldn’t have known otherwise about their grandparents. Like, this information doesn’t even exist on Google. And I’m attuned to reiki. I’m always aware of what’s happening on at least SOME metaphysical level. This is a gift that I’ve had to go through life developing and learning about myself, with no one’s help but me.

I didn’t even know until I was an adult that I have autism and ADHD.

I’ve taken bullets from people who were about to kill themselves. I’ve yelled at 5th grade music classrooms for doing racist dance moves and appropriating Native Americans (I have a degree in Music Education K-12). I’ve consoled kids in classrooms who suddenly have panic attacks. AND I’ve told horny teenagers to stay in their fucking lane and respect the girls around them. I’ve apparently been an inspiration to those around me, but inspiration NOR exposure pays the bills. I’ve already had COVID, and so has my husband, but I knew that after graduating college that I would never have a fulfilling life being a music teacher in Tennessee’s public schools.

And now that we have COVID, and an orange, small-dicked, pedophilic, rape apologizing, dirty, crusty white president who STILL REFUSES TO CONCEDE, who is DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR HAVING HIS FOLLOWERS SEND DEATH THREATS TO MY FAMILY, I really don’t know what the fuck else to do other than go burn down all the houses I know of in North Georgia that belong to these Christian sex cult pedophiles and call it a day. My girlfriend unfortunately was born into one of those families, and I know just how bad it can get. In fact, her dad’s lawyer threatened me with blackmail earlier in November, so that was fun!

And now, on December 11, 2020, I’m still sitting here in the same fucking house, doing the same fucking things I’ve been doing all year - trying to get a job and failing horribly. I’M SICK AND TIRED OF THIS COVID BULLSHIT AND OUR INCOMPOTENT CUNT OF A PRESIDENT! And there’s only ever one other person I’ve ever called a cunt... my own mother.

I’ve lived in many places. I’ve met many different people. I’ve made mistakes, and have grown, but there’s one thing for damn sure that I always make sure to do, every single fucking day.

I ALWAYS try to do better.

In addition to this, I treat everyone with the same amount of respect, unless they have done something directly to me to negate that. If I know that someone believes in something that directly harms me or my family, I don’t even associate with them. I don’t spend my energy on things that don’t need it. And everyone else should, too.

The problem with some of y’all is that you care about the wrong things. Like will Becky text me back or did I get front row seats to that concert, or did I slave my life away to capitalism just so that I can own a Mercedes and have my friends jealous. I’ve had way too many dear death experiences to know that EVERY single fucking day is a gift. EVERY day.

I don’t want to be remembered first for the art I create. I want to be remembered for my character. I want to be remembered as the courageous person who never backed down in the face of adversity. But when you live in a place that already hates you and that is against you, that’s really fucking hard. Trust me. My marriage went from a cis straight passing couple to a white gay passing couple. I’ve seen how people’s attitudes changed around me as I transitioned. I know what it feels like to slowly lose a piece of your privilege you were born with.

So yeah, I kinda get a little fucking upset when I see people saying All Lives Matter, or when I see doctors refusing to treat trans patients in pandemics, or when I see cops YET AGAIN harassing Black people only a few blocks away from my house for no other reason than racism. And at this point, anyone who thinks they know me but only knows what people think they know about me can suck my entire ass and eat ten dicks. I don’t give a FUCK about who you are or what you’ve done. If you treat me or other people with no respect for no reason other than to be an asshole, you’re just plain shit. If you SERIOUSLY believe every little rumor and lie that someone tells about me before meeting me, fuck you AND the horse you rode in on.

What I can’t stand is people doing or saying things just to get a rise out of me or others. I thought we left petty shit in high school. Some of the people that “know” me really need to fucking grow up and grow a pair and either say what they want to my face, or stay mad. I’m tired of playing fucking petty games with y’all. We have a whole ass pandemic to solve.

So here’s the ultimatum... if you agree that Black Lives Matter and that queer people deserve basic human rights, EVEN THE ONES YOU HATE, then that’s the bare minimum to even be a decent person. If you can’t even do those things, then I don’t fucking know what else to say to you.

So NBC, maybe not have John Mulaney joke about my license debacle with my gold van on SNL, and Seth Meyers... maybe HIRE ME INSTEAD of Mulaney because clearly y’all don’t know about the south as much as I do? Oh, and that gazeebo joke with Lee University... I caught that. I may have autism, but I’m not a fucking idiot. I mean. I’m funny when I’m given the chance. And yeah, I’m on a watchlist, but who the fuck isn’t these days? At least all my secrets are out for the world to see, and I have a bangin’ tattoo.

I’m tired of everyone being like “omg, I’ve seen what he can do, it’s fantastic!” or “omg you’re so funny haha” and bragging on me and then NOT FUCKING HIRING ME. I’m TIRED of waiting on something that’s clearly at this point never coming.

I don’t even have testicles, and my balls are bigger than most of the cis men I have EVER met.

So, if you want to help me, or hire me, or get me out to an audition... I’ll be there. But until then, I’m so fucking MAD at some of these producers. Yeah, my mom is a cunt, but she worked in various forms of digital production from the 1980′s until she retired this year. She taught me SO MUCH about directing, writing, shooting, and more. I know how these things are supposed to run behind the scenes. I know what the fuck I’m doing, and I don’t take constructive criticism like a bitch. I actually WANT to be criticized, so I can do even better.

So PLEASE, for the love of Christ... y’all need to get your priorities together AND PLEASE STOP LEAVING ME OUT OF THE LOOP WITH THIS BULLSHIT. Grow a fucking pair and either call me, email me, or leave me alone. It’s really not that fucking hard. Looking at you, Lorne Michaels.

Oh and someone tell my husband what the fuck’s been going on because I’m tired of him gaslighting me about it.

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starlitshores · 4 years

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This might end up being an unpopular opinion, but I’m actually okay with public figures - specifically white hockey players - showing up late to speak out against racism and in support of Black Lives Matter.

The statements that some players have made today sound more thoughtful and considered than I would have expected from them (the bar was low). That takes more work (and, we can hope, self-reflection) than smashing the share button on a corporate sponsor’s statement or an image that only lasts one day.

And yeah, we can choose to think positively and make the assumption that the younger guys who smashed that share button did so because their thoughts, feelings, and gut responses truly align with the messages that Black Lives Matter and bigotry is wrong and we need to do better.

But for some of these guys? Their statements sound like they had to actually take the time to open their eyes to the world outside of their privileged bubble and to actually listen. They had to take the time and sit with it and then figure out how to write a public response. And when they did, they were honest enough to admit that before this, they didn’t even notice. Not just that they have never experienced racism in any form themselves, duh, but that they were somehow walking through life willingly ignorant to reality.

And we can all sit here and go “You ASSHOLE. How did you NOT KNOW?” because I’m not trying to be funny how did you miss Michael Brown’s death and the Ferguson protests six years ago? How did your heart not break hearing about Tamir Rice over eight years ago? How have you not seen the long long lists of names of Black lives lost to police brutality? How did you not even hear about BLM holding up Pride parades IN YOUR SUMMER CITY to protest the presence and inclusion of cops? HOW?

However, everything we’ve all been sharing for the last week, we’ve been sharing in an echo chamber. We already care. So, fellow white people - and this may be obvious to many and is not intended to be repetive or condescending - we’re probably not really educating each other. But we do need to take the weight off our Black and other minority friends and educate other white people. That’s one of the big things we can and should do. And we need to accept that it’ll be uncomfortable and infuriating because the people who need educating are the ones who haven’t been paying attention, haven’t cared, and/or have actively been on the other side. (You know, the ones we don’t want to talk to at Thanksgiving or school or work. For REASONS.)

I’m biased as fuck about this because I teach racist white kids for a living. And I get one semester to shake those deeply ingrained prejudices loose enough that when I present new information or new opportunities to learn and expand their understanding of the world, something gets through. And whether it’s a 15 year old girl sobbing that she’s been a horrible person her whole life (we had a chat about white guilt and forgiving your child self in order to move forward as an ally) or a grown ass rich man finally not looking away and acknowledging his own privilege, I’ll take it. It’s a step.

What I took away from these statements, as lukewarm as some of them were, and as close-to-but-not-on-the-mark as others were, was a little ray of hope.

Based on NHL history - even though he’s answered questions about YCP and queer players and even used the word “paradigm” correctly in his response - I did not expect a player like Jonathan Toews to make any statement let alone one that I saw several white hockey fans in the comments respond to positively. And I definitely didn’t EVER think he’d also make a reference to the experience of North American First Nations in what I personally saw - ymmv - as a little dig at his team’s racist as fuck logo. (Please please please advocate for a change in the logo and branding, Jonny...)

Perhaps there are others who haven’t yet spoken up because they don’t feel ready. Either they’re not informed enough, or they don’t know how to say it, or they’re coming out of some murky dark hole of racist shit, or their white bubble just popped and the world is scarier than they realised. And there are for sure others who haven’t said anything because they’re quite happy in their white bubble and/or because they’re on the cops’ side and don’t want to bother with the PR. (Note: Eichel is an American captain, and Parise is from Minneapolis so their freedom and expectation to speak is, I’d argue, different.)

What I do know is that I’m okay with a late statement from someone who is doing the work and means it, and will happily hold them accountable for living up to it in future.

EDIT: I removed a section about Tyler Seguin. I’ve seen so much negativity about Tyler lately, especially regarding his stint in the Bahamas and that beer pong thing. And I think I allowed that and his past immature comments/behaviour to make me a bit more apologetic than I wanted to be regarding one of my favourite players. My literal gateway into hockey. I still want to acknowledge those past behaviours and my own worry when I saw that he posted because my bar for him IS higher than for other players based on what I’ve seen him do in his community and I was worried he might not meet it. He exceeded it. And since his original statement, he has STEPPED UP. He did a great interview with The Athletic, and the boy is now out there at a BLM protest in Dallas. That’s my baby and I’m proud. The end.

#hockey #white privilege #nhl #black lives matter #blm #totally my opinion and ymmv #long post #text post

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mst3kproject · 5 years

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SHORT: Undersea Kingdom

My previous experiences with serials on this blog have not been good. If I watch them all in one sitting they’re boring, and if I watch them one installment at a time I forget what happened. I was therefore kind of dreading Undersea Kingdom, and I decided that if this was my last chance to watch the edited-down ‘movie’ version, I was going to take it. Well, guess what? I can’t find the edited-down ‘movie’ version! So here I am, tackling the whole twelve-part series. Again.

An opening montage introduces us to Ray ‘Crash’ Corrigan, the finest specimen of white manhood ever to enlist in the US Navy. He is invited to join an expedition let by Professor Norton in his extremely roomy bubble-powered Rocket Submarine, to make contact with the lost city of Atlantis. Also along for the ride are Norton’s son Billy, Briny and Salty the obnoxious comic-relief sailors, Diana the reporter, and Sinbad the parrot. They arrive to find that all is not well at the bottom of the sea. Sharad, who is like the Pope of Atlantis or something, is engaged in an ongoing war with the tyrant Unga Khan, who wants to take over the city and then destroy the upper world with earthquakes so he can rule that, too! You can tell the difference between the two sides because Sharad’s guys wear white capes and Unga Khan’s wear black ones and are assisted by their old allies, the Neptune Men.

I mean, obviously a city at the bottom of the ocean has ties with the Neptune Men. Right? Right?

So after all the time I spent dreading this short, how much of an ordeal was it? Well… I watched it over the course of two days, and honestly? I kind of enjoyed it. Undersea Kingdom is pure low-budget cheese, but it somehow feels like low-budget cheese people cared about. Somebody was truly excited to tell this story, rather than just slotting themed setpieces into a formula. The ending lost me, but the rest really wasn’t awful.

Literally everything that happens in Undersea Kingdom is ridiculous. As Joel and the bots pointed out, the costumes are truly epic. Sharad wears a cross between a crown and a chef’s hat, with big fake plastic jewels on it. Unga Khan’s troops wear miniskirts and lightning bolts on their heads – his chief honcho, Hakkor, is played by Lon Chaney Jr, unusually sober and unsure what the hell he’s doing here. Unga Khan himself wears Genghis' pajamas, and Billy goes around in his little sailor suits with a shirt that keeps changing colour from scene to scene.

The Most Ridiculous Costume Award, however, has to go to Crash Corrigan himself. After saving Sharad’s life he is rewarded with command of the Whitecape army, and spends the rest of the serial in a scaly golden diaper, gladiator sandals, and a helmet that looks like it belonged to a Spartan who dressed as a chicken for Hallowe’en. I love it.

The plot, as is usual for a serial like this, is a nigh-endless series of narrow escapes, breathless chases, near-disasters, and Corrigan doing the one wrestling move he knows, which is picking a guy up over his shoulders and throwing him into a few other guys. People keep saying things like “that’s the end of Crash Corrigan!” and “there’s no chance anyone survived that explosion!” when they really ought to know better. In Radar Men from the Moon and The Phantom Creeps this stuff was pretty tiresome, as it felt like the plot was just wandering around without ever really escalating. In Undersea Kingdom, however, stuff actually happens and even has long-term consequences!

There’s an early scene where it looks as if we’re just going to get more of the repetitive shit, as Crash arrives in the nick of time to save Professor Norton from Unga Khan’s brainwashing machine – in the very next episode, Norton is recaptured and brainwashed anyway. This made me groan, because I was expecting it to go on like The Phantom Creeps’ endless game of Capture the Meteor. Instead, though, it actually moves the plot forward – the rest of the story ended up being about trying to rescue Norton, who didn’t want to be rescued because he’d been brainwashed! Although it did make me wonder why Unga Khan didn’t just put Corrigan in the brainwashing chamber… he had several oppotunities to do so.

While Radar Men from the Moon and The Phantom Creeps made liberal use of stock footage from both newsreels and previous serials, I think almost everything that appears in Undersea Kingdom was actually shot for it. The only notable exceptions are some of the sports sequences in the first episode and the sea battle in the last. Even better, it completely lacks the boring recap episode both of those felt they had to shove in before the climax! Some of the footage, like the shots of dozens of horsemen riding forth from Unga Khan’s underground fortress, is used repeatedly, but you probably wouldn’t notice that if you were watching it week-by-week. Oddly, the horses are the only animals we ever see in Atlantis. I wonder what the people there eat.

I was not looking forward to the episodes being peppered with the ‘hilarious’ ‘antics’ of Briny, Salty, and Sinbad, but to my surprise, they were barely in it. They get captured in the second episode and are completely forgotten about until something like the sixth, where we find them working in an Atlantean boulder mine and ‘comedically’ trying to escape. They must have managed it somehow because they reappear on the submarine at the end, but I think I missed how they did it. Maybe they were so annoying and unfunny that the majority of their scenes were cut.

None of this, of course, is to say that the serial is in any way really good. The costumes are ridiculous, the plot is dumb, and the whole thing is full of gaping holes in the logic, especially where the Atlantean technology is concerned. Unga Khan is able to spy on both Sharad and the Upper World through some kind of Atlantean CCTV, but it only shows him what the plot requires. The Neptune Men have ray guns but can’t hit anything. Unga Khan has a dirigible thing that would have been really useful during the siege scenes but never appears in them. And this applies to the low technology as much as the high kind – all the Atlanteans carry swords and nobody ever stabs anyone.

The weirdest moment is the bit where Corrigan just straight up becomes Hercules and bends prison bars to get through. He even bends them back afterwards, and his pursuers are astonished to find themselves unable to replicate the feat. Why is he able to do that? Does knowing one wrestling move and being able to walk a tightrope (which he does twice to get into or out of a place) grant superhuman strength?

Having been made in the 1930’s, the whole thing is kinda racist and deeply sexist. The racism is pretty mild as these things go – everybody’s white but Unga Khan is made up to look kind of Fu-Manchu-ish because he’s the Bad Guy. The sexism, on the other hand, is pervasive and sometimes puzzling. Everybody refers to Diana, played by twenty-nine-year-old Lois Wilde, as a ‘girl’, even the title cards, but at least she does get to do one useful thing by telling Sharad that Unga Khan is plotting to invade the surface world. Thing is, Diana is the only female character. In the whole serial I think I saw one Atlantean woman and she never spoke. How do you survive in isolation for six thousand years with no women?

I guess it doesn’t matter, since Atlantis wasn’t fated to last any longer. In the second-last episode, Unga Khan’s tower blasts off for the surface, piercing the roof of Atlantis and letting the ocean in. Our heroes escape to the submarine in time to avoid being drowned, but what about, like, everybody else? I think we’re meant to believe that a substantial number of the remaining Atlanteans were killed when Unga Khan bombed the rebel stronghold, but that can’t have been the whole population, can it? Somebody’s gotta be providing food for everybody… there must be farmers and ranchers around, even if we never met them. What happened to them? An entire civilization was just destroyed, and nobody seems to care except me!

The most annoying thing about this is that I think the reason it was written that way was so Crash Corrigan could have a happy ending! When Sharad made him commander, he made Corrigan responsible for the safety of the Atlantean people. If Atlantis hadn’t been flooded, or if anyone had survived, Corrigan would have had to stay and help them. In particular there’s Corrigan’s Atlantean BFF Molock, who owes him a life debt and pledges to follow him until he’s repaid it. If he lived Corrigan would be stuck with him. With the whole place destroyed, our hero is free to return to his naval career with no hitches.

Well, there’s one hitch. At the end Corrigan and Diana get married – despite having spent almost no time together over the course of the story. I guess they live happily ever after or something. I mostly enjoyed Undersea Kingdom, but the way it offhandedly killed all the Atlanteans so there wouldn’t be any consequences pissed me off enough that I refuse to recommend it.

#mst3k #reviews #undersea kingdom #30s

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harrisonchute · 6 years

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What’s Harison been Watching?!

9/8/2018 Edition

“Perfect Blue”

I haven’t encountered one of those “Perfect Blue EXPLAINED” videos on YouTube, though I did look for it, and any online writing about Perfect Blue is gonna be marred by very standard Satoshi Kon commentary, that he’s very influential, one of the best known in the west, he do dreams and reality. I just wanted to know what people made of this movie, what their interpretations are. I saw it for the first time Thursday night, and this is what I think: the main character’s mental breakdown caused by the existential transformation pop idol to actress, the Internet, and other celebrity life-inconveniences is then exacerbated by her manager’s serial killing. Rumi just wants to protect her, protecting her past self from exploitation, and because that murder violence is so similar to the exploitation, the main character sees herself in it -- she has to, in order to immerse herself in the new roles and grow as an actress. Ultimately, I feel like Perfect Blue is a more interesting film than it is a strictly entertaining one, like that one half of Serial Experiments Lain I’ve seen. Kon identifying all these different stressors facing popular public (and female) figures is fascinating. However, most of Perfect Blue is that space in movies that isn’t dialogue or action or exposition, it’s like mood-setting or suspense setup, like a Wong Kar Wai revision of The Strangers. I would not see that movie, but I’m glad I finally saw this one.

“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”

I was halfway through an episode of this show when I had to go see Perfect Blue. Not surprising -- I get this way with TV shows, and it’s obviously hardly uncommon for modern media consumers. Every now and again I’ll find a show that disrupts my life, and it’s all I can think about. I was grateful for short shows earlier this year that I loved, like Fleabag and one anime show whose name I can’t remember, swearsies. And yet, I was even more grateful that Kimmy Schmidt is like four seasons -- though it’s ONLY gonna be four seasons. Regardless, it’s really surprising, and it’s especially interesting in the context of other women-led womeny shows of its day.

Upon the infamous episode where Titus is criticized for doing yellowface, I’m watching the Internet outragists shout things like “I don’t want to know the context of anything!” and was left with the startling yet embarrassing conclusion: “My God, Tina Fey is soooo white.” Like, this is what gets to her? Embarrassing because I feel like that sentiment’s been on the Internet wall for ages, with every “Tina Fey did a bad thing” headline I’ve witnessed and ignored over the years. “White people” in media usually just means this is a person whose instincts were manufactured by a system demarcated by stratification: exclusive and hostile. Revising those instincts requires some listening skills, so I was put off by the backlash to the backlash here than anything anyone was lashing against initially.

I feel like Kimmy Schmidt is the absurd comedy version of Cloud Atlas, and the word “absurd” is really the key. So much of racial representation is reliant on “realism,” it seems, threading that needle where a world needs to convincingly contain the token black friend or whoever, and “realism” comes right down to tone. I get a little put-off by absurd comedies, like the short-lived Ghosted, much as I enjoyed it, and I think that comes from my time with Futurama: as that show went on, I started to appreciate the characters more than the jokes -- always a mistake. With that one, the integrity of strict character continuity was often sacrificed for the sake of a joke. Like, Leela is not that insensitive, but she has to be kind of a blowhard in this scene for the punchline to work. Sometimes, Kimmy seems to suddenly know more about the world than I’d expect, but they make it work, because who knows where she picks up these things? The comedy/drama balance isn’t as embedded into the show’s core like You’re the Worst or the above-mentioned Fleabag; it’s got its own logic, like magical realism with abandon, more Arrested Development than Jane the Virgin.

This logic allows -- to me -- navigation through a lot of the show’s spiky territory. For example, it’s hugely problematic that Lillian shot her black husband, because he was a black man in her house at night, but it didn’t bother me (last week). The subject of criticism in the first season leading to the outrage response in the second, Jane Krakowski’s American Indian heritage, didn’t bother me because under the surface there’s that blackened but beating white people heart of “the joke is that I’m soooo white.” Lines like, “The litter in New York makes me cry” got a genuine laugh out of me, and it felt like the best possible version of “Pardon my whiteness, I’m writing a Native American caricature.” I know we’ve had 17 seasons of Modern Family for that kind of humor, but here, it didn’t bother me.

Didn’t bother me. Love that line from minorities. That means it didn’t bother anyone, right? Of course, I’m neither a black man or American Indian, so what about the Dong story line? Issues facing Asian-American men are very different from most social issues, because they all hinge on his penis and where it goes. Satiating AsAm men’s desire to be represented by anybody but Ken Jeong is a one-step process, which is why my desire no longer exists (because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend does, and Selfie before it). So it was a pleasant surprise that Dong became an actual love interest, but it didn’t change my world, and a love story is not handled with the same gravity as shows with different logic -- are we meant to take any of this seriously? Is Kimmy meant to grow as a character? Is anyone? Jane Krakoswki does, but does it matter? My brain is different watching this show, where true pathos comes from moments reached upon layers of irony and cynicism and an almost exhausting one-person race to stay ahead of the cultural conversation. For example, Titus’s romance in the two and a half seasons I’ve seen has been touching, but because it involves Titus, it’s expressed with a much more interesting vocabulary than other gay romances I’ve seen. (Though it’s probably relatively traditional and I still just think Brokeback Mountain is the raddest shit ever).

The difference between the American Indian and Dong plot lines is that I theoretically got a strand of representation out of the Asian-American element in the show, where I doubt an American Indian did from Krakowski’s plot line (though you never know until you ask). But I wasn’t asking for representation (this time), and no one else was asking to be alienated by stereotypes. So I can understand the frustration on both sides -- sometimes, it doesn’t matter how steeped in irony racism is. And as someone who’s created things for an audience once before, I know you can’t please everyone, and it’s the negative voices that resound the loudest, because they’re only echoing what’s already in one’s heart as a fragile left-brain writer variety.

My ability to excuse or at least compartmentalize the problematic in Kimmy Schmidt seems to be part of a concerted effort to appreciate a sitcom’s unique sheen. I like that a show doesn’t need to say important things to be important, that one can draw meaning from near-total meaninglessness. The joys I’ve had watching this show have mostly come from Ellie Kemper’s facial expressions and halting, intense deliveries, and I think we only get those with all the other ingredients -- contrarian satire which sometimes crosses that line from centrism to taking a side, like wow you’re so too cool for school you... went to school.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is the show I’m most familiar with in this burgeoning televisual fempire, and the creators of that one are constantly listening to fan feedback, almost to a fault. They seem determined to get everything right, understanding that any one individual, no matter how much a quadruple or quintuple-threat, represents the outlook of an individual, and so they’ve built a dimensional writers room and the show reflects that with its characters and their stories. But they did all that because their show is specifically about inclusion -- off the show’s title, this is the journey of a woman from rejected by society to creating her own. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt has less of a clear thesis, and its moral lessons often feel networky and only there for some kind of conscience quota. But unlike CXG, it exists in the here and now, with dated references to The Jinx, to Marcia Clark and Chris Darden pre-American Crime Story, and now hugely insensitive jokes about shooting black men in that specific circumstance. The morality feels like a work-in-progress during an era in American society where the conversation changes every day, like the ever-shifting substance of crackling television noise.

Before CXG, I used to think it was some herculean task to listen to feedback. And on occasion, I’ll hear a video game player talk at length about how “the studio listened to its fans!” and cringe, because I know how those fans speak, at what decibel, and with what, frankly, terribly foul language. Maybe the Internet outrage episode in Kimmy Schmidt wouldn’t have stung as much had I not seen it in the context of Apu on The Simpsons. Now, there’s an example of creators who don’t give a shit. I have a lot more faith in Fey and co., with an understanding that her brand of comedy is always poking and prodding. Comedy is observation, and so much of the observation under men’s watch was “other people are different.” Kimmy Schmidt is tackling that head on, with interesting results I ultimately am not interested in, because it’s too joyous and weird.

I never regularly watched 30 Rock, but now revisiting that one via YouTube clips and compounded with a new love for Kimmy Schimidt, I’m noticing just how lyrical Tina Fey (and co.)’s dialogue is. They say there’s zero improv on that set, and I understand why -- the often tongue-twisting wordplay has a perfect cadence that’s fun to listen to and must be fun to perform. Since I’m now trying to understand rhythm in writing, this is one I’m gonna study.

Spent too much time on this, dammit. Little over two hours, I think.

PS: Anna Camp had a few guest appearances and she should’ve won an Emmy for that role if she didn’t. Or, they don’t need to make Big Little Lies season 2, because that sort of upper crust mommy wars was so perfectly satirized by that arc with Jane Krakowski.

#kimmy schmidt

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not-gae-cuz-i-like-straight-wae · 3 years

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Part 2: Here we go again

So Jeansaaa wrote another message and I don't feel like putting too much effort in my answer, because I actually shouldn't give him/her any more attention, but I think I can make things even a bit more clear this time for all other people out here on Tumblr. Also, I blocked him/her now instead, because she/he seems to be incapable of keeping me blocked... I'm gonna talk to him/her, so I'll use "you", because that's more easy and direct then him/her or they.

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You first started of by saying (in the title) that you made a response post becasue responding to a re-blog in mobile is hard (smiley included), which is not very important... Then you followed with "for context look at my re-blog below" and thereafter, your message actually started.

Before I copy-paste the first part I'm responding to, I wanna say: use punctuation, dude! Your whole message is like one long sentence with commas.

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Okay, that being said, let’s begin:

I just wanna be done with This, the reason why I texted this 🙃 (the “smiley face”) after I said “don’t worry i’ll block you” is because it was supposed to be passive aggressive, I un-blocked you by accident (because I’m a clumsy mess, and I didn’t even know I un-blocked you until after you private messaged me about it), and I told people to block you, because this kind of stuff can make people incredibly uncomfortable,(and you’re being blatantly homophobic which I’m sure nobody within the lgbtq+ Community would like to see that)

Yeah, I'm glad I decided on blocking you myself! I'm not someone who blocks others. I'm not gonna hide from someone that doesn't share my opinion. Just acting like a little child and press that block button. I'd rather have normal conversations or even discussions like not-little-kids, teens and adults do (that's why I take so much time to explain myself as much as possible), but that blocking-unblocking-blocking-unblocking started to become quite annoying.

Also, I think people can decide for themselves whether they wanna block me or not. We're not all imbeciles, you know? And probably the only reason why people would even go to your blog and see you telling them to block me, is because of me. Right now, you literally got seven posts and almost all of them have to do with me (exceptions: 2). Kinda feel honored, really, but I actually pretty much regret bringing you in the spotlight now. If I hadn't reblogged your post, I doubt it if anyone would've ever seen your blog...

no matter how much you sugar coat it, supporting straight pride is under the umbrella of homophobia,

It's not, though. Don't make up your own definitions. Homophobia is showing dislike of or prejudice against gay people.

you’re basically saying that putting up lgbtq+ posters, making lgbtq+ safe-spaces won’t work, and you’re wrong, I live in Florida, a very anti-lgbtq+ State, I’ve been a victim of homophobia / transphobia ,

Posters won't stop homophobia / transphobia. Neither people who don't like your behaviour nor people who already accept your behaviour will change their behaviour because of a poster. Or at the very least, it will only anger those "very-dangerous-straights-that-hunt-you-guys" that you're talking about, more. But I know why you like those posters. You want those posters to be hanged up because you want to be the "star of the show". And that, I have to admit, IS working.

and when I see a poster, or even just a small sticker saying, lgbtq+ safe space, it just makes me feel better about myself ,

Honestly, that you need POSTERS and STICKERS to make you feel better about yourself, already tells me more than enough about your self confidence. WOW.

and yes you’re not “victimized”or “oppressed” if you Truly think you are

Dude, I literally said I know I'm not (in real life, because online, the story is a lot different these days).

answer this , have you’re parents ever kicked you out for being straight?, have you ever been bullied for being straight?, have you been called slurs for being straight?, have you ever hated yourself for being straight?,

No, why would I get kicked out / bullied / called a slur? WHY would I hate myself? I seriously don't know how to respond to this. Just an example: if a alcohol addicted person would ask me "have YOU ever felt bad for NOT feeling the need to drink?" I'd also be like... "Err. NO."

and about the gay friends, what you said is basically the same as, “I’m not racist because I have black Friends”, it doesn’t matter what friends you have your still homophobic. (Sorry if the formatting is weird, i’m not the best at writing, but I hope I got the point across)

I hate that nasty habit of you all to make comparisons with racism in discussions with lgbt+ topics. It's not the same! I know it's a filthy trick of yours to pretend like it IS all the same, but I'm not falling for that! I'm NOT a racist! Besides, I didn't say "I'm not homophobic, because I have gay friends". It was just something I added. I did give enough actual reasons for why I'm not homophobic, though.

This time, to even clearify that point MORE (when will I ever be done clearifying myself, hahaha), I'm gonna take that alcohol addicted person (shortening it to: AAP) as an example again. I don't support people to be alcohol addicted. It's their own choice. Imagine if that AAP wants to campaign for allowing drunk people to drive. I'm very much against that. The AAP gives alcohol to his/her children (and might pass the addiction to them). I'm most definitely against that too (because it has impact on the next generation). When he's/she's in the mood, the AAP drinks him-/herself half to death. I find that disgusting. I find it inhuman. I find that this person should work on some self-control over his/her desires! Having all these thoughts about the AAP, still doesn't make me AAP-phobic, though. Because if this person encounters me (in a not drunk state, of course), I will act normally towards him/her. I might tell him/her what I think about the addiction, but I'm not being a hateful person by doing so. I don't show dislike / prejustice against people that are addicted to alcohol (I also don't know why I should have to know about someone's alcohol addiction in the first place). And if the whole world starts to campaign for all AAP's due to an agenda that's been executed and they push it all in my and everyone’s face and I'm against THAT, it STILL doesn't make me AAP-phobic. That would make me AAP-agenda-phobic. Or that would make me changing-the-world-wrongly-phobic. Or altering-general-morality-phobic. Because YES. That IS what I am. I'm not lgbtqabcxyz-phobic, but I'm most certainly against all this brainwashing and mindcontrolling that's happening nowadays. This is what I told someone recently in a similar discussion (it’s “ABC”, the person I still intend to respond to on my blog and I wrote this in our private chat too):

“Look, you just can't expect everyone to just accept everything. You can't expect everyone to alter the vision of reality. You can't expect everyone to just be a leaf in the wind. To go with the flow. I know lots of people are like that, but I'm not. If they would suddenly tell me eating through your ears is just as normal as through your mouth, no matter how many people would agree with that, no matter how many people would tell me I'm crazy for thinking otherwise, my opinion would remain unchanged. That's just me. I don't wanna be a leaf. I'd rather be a tree. Only I'd try to stay in my grounds even during thunderstorms or in a hurricane... Hopefully, you can understand that.”

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Jeansaaa’s message ended here initially, but then:

Edit: holy fucking shit, I re-read you’re response, it’s even worse then I remember, so I will add a bit more to this,

All right first of all you said being lgbtq+ was ABNORMAL, (wow that is really not helping your case) it’s not at all, it’s just as “normal” as being straight, people have been lgbtq+ for fucking CENTURIES,

Even now, lgbt+ still ISN’T the NORM in the world (I know some would love to see that differently, but I’m (not) afraid that won’t ever be the case). So that’s a FACT. And yes, a lot of people have been a lot of things for centuries, but what kind of argument is that?! That people are or do something, doesn’t make it normal. Some people are in jail. Some people are in mad houses. Some psychopaths walk around freely, but does that mean all that is normal too? No, it doesn’t. Your argument is bad. VERY bad.

even animals can be gay, if you do even the slightest bit of research you’ll see

And you know when? When they’re in ABNORMAL situations!

( but Seeing how your skull is as thick as concrete, you probably won’t ),

Thanks! I’m taking that as a compliment! I’m very happy if my skull really is as thick as concrete instead of as thin as paper (or even thinner)! Or else everyone (such as (social) media) would be able to just fill my head with whatever they want! Mold and knead me however they please! That would be one of the last things I’d want to happen. I got a brain for a reason. I got a brain to use it. To think for myself, using logic and not other people’s opinions.

now let’s move onto the second homophobic thing you said, you don’t support the lgbtq+ movement because of a so-called “ agenda”, why are you so mad?, Is it because straight relationships aren’t pushed in your face as much as it was back then?, ( magazines, Books, TV shows, billboards, straight relationships are literally everywhere and you’re COMPLAINING) you probably saw like one poster one day with a gay couple and freaked out,

Firstly, I’m not the “mad” one here. I’m angry about various things, but not “mad”. Secondly, straight relationships indeed aren’t pushed in my face as much as it was in back in the old days, but I don’t care about that. It’s lgbt+ that’s been forcefully pushed in my face CONSTANTLY (and it is) that bothers me so much!

Because NO. I didn’t “saw like one poster one day with a gay couple and freaked out”. That’s what I’ve been telling / explaining since pretty much my very first post about this! Saying this, makes me wonder if you can even read? Or else, you’ve obviously not read the parts of my posts in which I spoke about the hundreds of lgbt+ flags, many lgbt+ zebra crossings and lgbt+ wall paintings, lgbt+ public transport vehicles and to that list I can add the lgbt+ posters and stickers you spoke about, all lgbt+ promoting articles, shows and programms on the news everywhere (news papers and online) and on television, initiatives and activities of schools because of lgbt+, the countless lgbt+ campaigns that are being held, all other kinds of lgbt+ support of millions of people that just follow the herd AND the entire internet, including - of course - our most favorite straightphobic place, Tumblr (and I believe Twitter is pretty much like that (or even worse) as well). And who knows what else I’m not even aware of?! Ah, yes. And NOT to forget: the entire PRIDE MONTH. Because your kind of people are better than us straights, aren’t you?!

Really “like one poster one day with a gay couple”. REALLY.

please just stop,

I stop whenever I want...

nothing is gonna convince me that you’re not homophobic, because you’re clearly are

Nothing is gonna convince ME that you’re not STUPID, because you (not “you’re”) clearly are, stupid.

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I’m not even gonna respond extensively to the tags. They’re the stupidest things ever. I’ve never tagged my lgbt+ posts with the Arch-Illager OR Minecraft Dungeons tag, so Jeansaaa is just being a jerk for doing that anyway.

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That’s all. It turned out to be a very long response. Once I start typing, the words just flow from my head to and out of my fingers on the keyboard to the screen. And that. That was indeed a strange sentence. But... poetic... right? (No? Oh.)

#this must be #like #my longest post to date #and yeah #discussing lgbt+ again #well #as long as i get my message conveyed #it's fine

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richiestoziers · 7 years

Text

and you are my future

summary: bill denbrough and stanley uris think about their future while babysitting georgie

warnings: a kiss, idk if there is anything else ?? also not edited so it may be shit

read it on ao3 here

stanley uris and bill denbrough were seniors in high school and both were desperately ready to get out of derry and live their lives far away from maine. it wasn’t like there was some grand evil force pushing them out of derry, or abusive parents, or guilt's that made them want to leave. they wanted to leave derry just because it was derry, it was a town stuck in days where racism and homophobia were the norm, it was a town where the overall vibe was one of eeriness, where you felt like you were in a bad dream you couldn’t wake up from. both wanted out, they had been in a relationship since sophomore year of high school and have been planning their ‘great escape’, even going on college tours together junior year to make sure they went to the same place. they had both been accepted to university of washington and were already planning to be roommates. stan would be an accountant, bill would take his love for writing all the way and strive to be an author, and they both found comfort in these thoughts. they just had to push through these last few months before they could leave, but it was somehow easier to be in derry knowing they were going to be leaving soon.

which is why when bill’s parents last minute decided to go on a date night and needed bill to babysit georgie, he wasn’t mad (even though him and stan had planned on a nice date that night). he had texted stan that he couldn’t make it for the date because he had to watch his little brother, making sure he would make it up to him as soon as possible (tomorrow night sound good?). of course he wishes he could be out with stan, but he had to remember that once he was gone he wouldn’t be seeing georgie every day like he was used to. georgie was the part of derry he would miss the most, that ten year old boy was the light of his life (besides stan), and there was no one bill denbrough loved more than his little brother.

“so georgie, what are we going to do today now that mom and dad are out? i still have halloween rented, if you think you can handle that.” maybe he was being a bad influence on his little brother, because he knew georige wouldn’t be able to sleep at night after seeing michael myers on screen.

georgie’s smile grew wider, teeth missing and under his pillow, and his hair was needing a trim, which was obvious by the way he continued to move it out of his face. the boy was jumping with excitement, and bill knew it was too late now to take back the offer of halloween. “please, bill, please! i wanna see it so bad, i won’t tell mom and dad you showed it to me if you don’t!” he begged, his pinky out initiating a pinky promise (which to georgie meant you could never, ever break.)

bill looked down on his young brother, already missing him, and wrapped his pinky around the boys much smaller one. “it’ll be our little secret, but you do know that means no going into mom and dads room if you’re having nightmares tonight.”

georgie rolled those big brown eyes, moving his hand back and out of the pinky promise. “i’m ten now bill, i’m not gonna get afraid, and i’m not gonna need to go into mom and dads room! i’m old now, i can handle this! promise!” bill remembered when he was his age, thinking ten years old meant you were practically an adult, and he wondered if he had ever been as innocent as georgie was now.

seven years ago seemed like a lifetime ago though, and he couldn’t even remember what a ten year old bill’s thoughts were then. he wondered if his crush on stan had been there even then, maybe it was and he didn’t even know about it, because he can’t imagine himself ever not liking stan now. of course there was that one time he liked beverly, back in the third grade play, but that didn’t last long. after that one kiss he followed her around the halls like a lost puppy, but with the jokes from his friends and nothing happening after that week (children were impatient), he somehow forgot he even liked her and she went back to being a borderline stranger to him.

he knew he liked stan by the eighth grade though, afraid of accepting the truth any sooner, but he couldn’t deny it from himself any longer. not when puberty was hitting the boy and while others were talking about the girls they wanted to kiss (amongst other things), bill could only look at stan’s lips while thinking of this. it wasn’t that he didn’t like girls, or the thought of kissing them, but when he thought about who’s lips he wanted pressed up against his that curly haired boy across from him was the one who popped in his mind.

of course nothing happened until sophomore year, and in those years in between were spent with him slowly finding a way to tell him or see if he could possibly feel the same way. he was scared of losing such a good friend over a crush that he seemed he couldn’t get over, and by the end of freshmen year bill found it unbearable to keep going without confessing his feelings. sleepless nights where the boys would watch scary movies and wake up with their bodies intertwined, or when bill would follow behind him as he bird watched and listened as he marveled at blue jays and canaries.

that was the summer when everything changed, when they would go to the aladdin together and graze their hands in the popcorn, and walk home closer together than usual. it was after one of those nights bill confessed, walking stan to his door and stopping him before he could walk in, stuttering his way through a confession and ending the night with both of them smiling and their lips still tasting like the others.

he even remembered hearing stan’s laugh afterwards as bill drove off on silver (his body now fitting in the large bike) laughing as he screamed “high ho silver away!” biking home quicker than ever, the adrenaline of kissing the boy he had liked for years still fresh in his system.

that was the beginning of what bill hoped was the rest of his life, because to him stan was his life. he wanted to run away with that boy and start their lives together, get their careers on track and get married when the time felt right, find a house in the suburbs and adopt some kids and live the perfect life. he wanted them to be a modern day nuclear family.

lost in his daydream he almost forgot about georgie, and only got out of it once georgie was shaking bill and he heard his phone loudly ringing in his ear. “billy, stan’s been calling.”

bill could feel his already present smile growing bigger at the thought, grabbing his phone out of georgie’s hand and responding. he gave georgie a little wink and smile to make sure things were okay and that georgie wasn’t feeling neglected as he talked to his boyfriend.

“hey babe, what’s up?” he asked, turning his back from georgie as if that gave him some sense of privacy. he could feel georgie against his leg though, trying to eavesdrop, he was always a curious little boy.

stan’s voice across the phone responded with “nothing, i was just wondering if maybe i could come over? i can help watch georgie and i promise i won’t be too much of a distraction. you know i’m good with kids and i love georgie. it’s fine if you don’t want me there or anything, i just miss you and was looking forward to our date tonight.” stan rambled, obviously trying to convince him while also trying to seem like things would be fine either way.

bill chuckled at his boyfriend, the usually quiet boy rambling on and on, that never failed to make him fall more in love with him. “of course you can come over, though warning, we’re going to be watching halloween tonight.”

“are you sure that’s a good idea? there is nudity in that movie and georgie is only ten. do you really want to corrupt his young mind like that?” stan questioned, half joking half serious.

“come on, we can cover georgie’s eyes during those parts. i can have one hand on his left eye and you can have one hand on his right eye. it will be perfect.” he joked, laughing at his own joke.

he could already tell stan was rolling his eyes, but what he knew was a fact was stan’s small laugh. “good plan, denbrough. i’ll be over soon, don’t start halloween without me.” stan said as if he hadn’t seen it already.

“bye.” they said to each other, both smiling as they hung up the phone, bill going to the couch with georgie and stan hopping on his bike and racing over to bill’s house.

“what did stanley have to say? georgie asked, dropping down on the couch next to his tall brother. he always used stan’s full name, he always saw stan as some type of celebrity, where you had to say their full name rather than what they typically went by.

bill felt the couch dip near him as his little brother cuddled up next to him, always looking for attention from his older brother. bill was the object of georgie’s idolatry, and he was always ready for bill time. “just that he’s coming over to watch halloween with us, that’s okay right?” he felt a pang of guilt, he hadn’t even thought to ask georgie if it was okay. looking down at his brothers face he waited for his response, hoping it was a good one.

georgie gave him a smile, hopefully a genuine one, and nodded his head. “i’m gonna miss you both when you’re gone.” he had gotten used to stan now, he was practically living at the denbrough house most of the time, and he already felt as if bill and him were a married couple.

bill gave his brother a hug, arms wrapped around the small boy, giving him a smile in return. “good, because if you don’t want him over i can tell him to stay home. he won’t mind.”

georgie shook his head, smiling up at him, some teeth missing in said smile. “i’m fine, billy.”

“good.” was all bill had to say, the moment a quiet relaxing one, but that could never last long with the denbrough brothers. soon bill’s hands were tickling at georgie’s stomach, even going for his armpits (the most ticklish on georgie). the young boys laughter filling the room, only ending with the doorbell going off indicating stan was there.

“one second, georgie.” bill got up from the couch leaving georgie with his head turned to the door, watching his brother move to the door.

the door opened to stanley uris behind it, his bike on the grass of their front lawn, and a smile wide on his face. stan was 5′7″ and would probably never grow to be any taller, while bill was the tallest of the group (tied with richie, who’s growth spurts kept coming and coming) at 6′0″. stan moved in to give his much taller boyfriend a hug, before letting himself in and sitting next to georgie (who bill was starting to think was his favorite denbrough brother).

bill followed behind, sitting on the other side of georgie, the couple looking like a little family with his brother in between them. “hey georgie.” stan gave his little brother a hug, and bill could feel his heart melt as he watched the two. “i hear we are gonna be watching halloween tonight, are you sure about that?”

georgie’s smile disappeared at that, more annoyed now (not really), and hating being treated like a child. “i’m ten now! i can handle it, i already pinky promised to bill i wouldn’t get scared and i wouldn’t tell our parents. i’m ready for the movie!” he wasn’t really mad, but he was trying to seem like it.

“whatever you say, georgie.” stan gave him a sly smile, going along with georgie’s play of this being serious.

georgie turned back to the tv, comfortable and warm between the two boys he saw as gods. “well, someone put the movie in!” he jokingly bossed them around, anxious to see his first rated R film.

“i’ll get it.” bill got up to put in the dvd, skipping through the ads and pressing play before getting comfortable on the couch once more.

the movie starts and when it wasn’t spent with bill worrying about what scenes to cover up georgie’s eyes, he was watching his boyfriend with his little brother, never happier in his life. imagining stan with their own child one day. he moved his arm around georgie and to stan’s shoulders, poking him until he looked back at him. bill gave him a smile, mouthing an ‘i love you’ to him.

stan squeezed bill’s hand, mouthing ‘i love you too’ back, turning back to the movie, but bill kept looking at him none the less. analyzing his side profile, the way his nose turns, the pucker of his lips, his eyelashes, his face changing at certain scenes, and how no matter how many times he pushed his curls back they will always fall right back in front of his face. bill could never get enough of this boy, and just seeing this made him want that future they always dreamed of more than ever.

by the end of the night georgie was partially traumatized, and asking bill if he could sleep in his room that night. of course he said yes and sent him up to get in his pajamas while he sent stan out. alone for once that night bill help stan’s hands in his, looking down to his boyfriend with those blue puppy dog eyes stan loved so much. “you were great with georgie tonight. you always are but, seeing you with him tonight really just had me thinking. i want that one day, with us, having a kid of our own.” he knew he wasn’t coming on too strong, they had talked about the topic before, and he was comfortable saying almost anything to stan.

he could see the red of heat form on stan’s cheeks, loving the way he was still able to make his boyfriend blush, and wishing this night would never end. “well we have to wait a few years for that, but i feel the same way. you’d be a great father bill, and there is no one else i’d want to raise a child with.” stan and bill had a tender look in their eyes, they were seventeen years old, and yet more mature than they should be.

“i can’t wait for that day, stan, and i really hope it comes.” he couldn’t even imagine them breaking up, but there was always the inevitable that it could happen. he couldn’t imagine himself being with another, raising children with another, but even when he spoke about it he always had to have that thought in the back of his mind just in case.

stan took one hand out of bill’s and cupped his boyfriends face, reaching up to get there. “it will. i’m in it for the long run, bill.” and with that he moved up to kiss his boyfriend goodnight. he pulled away, eyes still closed for a bit, finally opening them and giving bill a look that made him know that they were forever. “goodnight, bill.” was all stan said before he walked out the door, riding off on his bike into the darkness leading back to his house.

“goodbye, stan.” bill uttered, watching his boyfriend leave, closing the door and leaning on it to replay that moment over and over again. he was never happier than with stan, and today was the best yet. he resigned his fantasies for tomorrow, ready to go to bed and deal with a terrified georgie. another part of his future parenting, all with stanley uris.

#stenbrough #stanley uris #stan uris #bill denbrough #stenbrough oneshot #my writing #stan #bill

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d2kvirus · 5 years

Text

Dickheads of the Month: April 2019

As it seems that there are people who say or do things that are remarkably dickheaded yet somehow people try to make excuses for them or pretend it never happened, here is a collection of some of the dickheaded actions we saw in the month of April 2019 to make sure that they are never forgotten.

It was one calamity after another for The Independent Hashtag Change Group Ltd throughout the course of the month, starting with the party limited company being informed that they would not be allowed to use their logo on European election ballots due to some genius having the idea to put a hashtag slogan on the logo. If that wasn't bad enough, soon the party leader Heidi Allen (not to be confused with the bloke who keeps turning up to meetings of party leaders Chuka Umunna) declaring that they would both support Theresa May in the face of any No Confidence vote in Parliament and they were opposed to a general election, which served to make an easy punchline out of them calling themselves Change UK...except when they keep calling themselves TIG, which is the exact reason they weren’t allowed to use their chosen logo on the European election ballot papers. And then when they announced their candidates for the European elections things rapidly went south when Nora Mulready was found to have posted Islamophobic comments and shared far-right material online while Ali Sadjady was found to have described all Romanian migrants as pickpockets and thieves - and then the ultimate irony came when antisemitic comments from Frances Weetman came to light, meaning that evidence of racism, antisemitism and Islamophobia were evident from their candidates, and all that the party limited company could do was bleat about “smears” as if a sizable percentage of their MPs has not been screeching “Corbyn’s an antisemite!!!” for over a year

With crocodile tears in her eyes Anna Soubry told the BBC how terrible it was that Nick Boles’ customs union proposal lost in parliament by 21 votes and that, with Boles being bullied out of the Tories by UKIP entryists in his local party, he would be welcome in The Independent Group Ltd - somehow neglecting to mention that she and her ten mates in The Independent Group Ltd all voted against Boles’ proposal, which is not just a funny way to show how welcome he would be in the party but also means that those eleven votes were the reason his proposal failed in parliament

Waffling gargoyle Nigel Farage announced his new political party that would oppose the EU by having him re-elected to the EU Parliament so he could continue collecting his MEP’s salary in spite his long-standing record of only bothering to turn up if he’s got a video to film for his Youtube channel (before he promptly buggers off as soon as he finishes speaking), but his party is completely legitimate and clearly represents the views of the common man based on their unveiling of their first candidate...Annunziata Rees-Mogg

All the work that Jacob Rees-Mogg has put in to proving himself to be the Europhobe’s Europhobe for the last couple of years came crashing down when he started sharing Alternative für Deutschland posts on Twitter - so not only could he be criticised for sharing material from a far-right group, but the support he’s cultivated for the past two years were frothing at the mouth because he had the gall to share material from a foreign far-right party

Seemingly emboldened by bullying both Boles and Dominic Grieve out of the Tory party, doing a lap of honor Andy Wigmore took to Twitter to threaten any Tory MP who opposed Britait would face deselection - which, considering Wigmore is not a member of the Tory party, immediately confirms the entryism into the Tory party from Arron Banks’ far-right mob that has been taking place

With Labour once again surging in the polls Margaret Hodge took the only action she could think of, which was to secretly tape her talking with Jeremy Corbyn on the subject of antisemitism and then promptly leak the tape to the Sunday Times to prove...I have no idea what she was trying to prove, because releasing the audio strengthened Corbyn’s position while making her look like her agenda has made her legitimately deranged

The far-centre extremists at The Guardian decided, quite coincidentally the day before the local elections, that JA Hobson’s Imperialism was antisemitic all because Jeremy Corbyn wrote a foreword for the 2011 edition - somehow failing to consider that not only had several other people written forewords for this edition, but previous people to speak favourably of the book include Gordon Brown in 2005, Tony Blair in 1995 and...well this is awkward, The Guardian themselves, not least because Hobson previously wrote for them

Having announced his retirement from MMA competition Conor McGregor wanted to give his fanbase one final reminder of what he was like at his peak - but once again making bigoted comments about Khabib Nurmagomedov’s religion, knowing full well that his retirement means Khabib wouldn’t be caving his face in like the last time McGregor spent months making bigoted comments about his religion

Of course Alan Sugar was going to take to Twitter and voice his opinion of Jeremy Corbyn, it’s what he does - and just like every other time he made a complete bellend of himself, first by suggesting that renationalising the UK rail industry is “communism” in spite of the minor fact that countless countries across Europe have nationalised rail industries that are significantly cheaper and more efficient than the privatised mess in the UK, and he followed that up by saying how terrible socialism is while speaking fondly of growing up in a council flat...you know, things that were provided due to social housing programs

Somehow not learning that exposing his ignorance of subjects he mouths off about on Twitter doesn’t work out well for him, it wasn’t long before Alan Sugar once again took to Twitter to give his opinion on Jeremy Corbyn’s plans for income tax - where he demonstrating an alarming lack of understanding of how income tax works, not least with his belief that those earning £100k p/a would pay the same rate as those earning £1m (they wouldn’t) and then veering off into outright making shit up about 70% tax rates

In response to Moise Kean being racially abused by Cagliari fans, Juventus coach Massimiliano Allegri and centre back Leonardo Bonucci both came to the same conclusion: Kean was at least 50% responsible for celebrating the goal he just scored, which is the exact thing that a player who has been racially abused wants to hear from his manager and one of his teammates

Having apparently not seen the Brass Eye special from 2002 Gordan Strachan came out in defence of convicted child molester Adam Johnson by saying that if he ever set foot on the pitch again the abuse he would receive is just another form of racism...this being the Adam Johnson who was jailed for grooming an underage girl for sex, who has been barred from any activity where he comes into direct contact with youngsters (i.e. ballboys and mascots for football matches), has to sign on the sex offenders register for several years, and contrary to what Strachan said has not served his sentence as he was released on license

Proving that some politicians really haven’t figured out that people can see what they post on social media was prospective Labour councillor Bob Murray who thought it was a very, very clever thing to post that Hitler had the right idea about travelers and asked if anyone could rustle up some gas canisters, a post which subsequently saw him suspended from the party for being a bigoted moron - although quite why The Board of Deputies of British Jews felt the need to issue a statement about this considering that he did not make any antisemitic comments, especially when they did not feel the need to issue statements when Tory councilors such as Bob Frost and Mike Bird made equally bigoted comments, does beg to be asked

Sentient testicle Toby Young appears to be really, really triggered by Greta Thunberg based on him spending several days tweeting any half-baked insult he could think of about her, all of which culminated in deciding that, as her mother once represented Sweden at Eurovision, this makes Greta “privileged” and she should shut her trap - which only serves to underline the complete lack of self-awareness the sentient testicle has, given he only got into Cambridge because his life peer father had a word with the head of admissions after his son tanked his A-Levels

In the space of an interview with The New Statesman Roger Scruton managed to use bizarre conspiracy theories about George Soros that were dripping with undercurrents of antisemitism, be incredibly Islamophobic while also claiming that Islamophobia doesn’t exist and is merely used as a gag to avoid criticism, and wrapped the whole thing up with the old chestnut of saying all Chinese people look the same - so of course, after the Tories removed him from his role of housing tsar we got the usual crap from the usual crapheads, with Paul Joseph Watson agreeing that Islamophobia doesn’t exist so he shouldn’t have been sacked, while GuidoBlog talking of his “greatness”, his treatment was “appalling” according to Melanie Phillips howling into the void, according to Adrian Hilton he’s one of our greatest aesthetes so apparently can be an ignorant bigot to his heart’s content, and sentient testicle Toby Young bawled something about political correctness gone mad...oh, and The Board of Deputies of British Jews weren’t rushing to issue a statement, even though they couldn’t get one out fast enough about Bob Murray the previous day

Of course Roger Scruton wasn’t quite done, as he followed up with some blather about conservative voices being silenced in the media...in a series of radio interviews, which were in response to the criticism he received for an interview with The New Statesman and other comments from interviews with The Spectator, all of which undermines his comment just a tad...

On a similar note Fraser Nelson opined in the Telegraph that the young have never heard the case for Conservatism in the media...especially not in the Telegraph, Daily Mail or Daily Express which do nothing but espouse Conservatism, let alone the BBC and their continued dereliction of duty that now has them straight up pretending Labour policy announcements don’t exist so they can continue telling the world the wonders of Conservatism and let various Conservatives speak unopposed no matter how many lies and falsehoods they litter their interviews on the Today programme with every single week. Or, you know, the fact the Tories have been in power since 2010, which is surely the case for Conservatism as being in power is the only thing the Tories care about

Of course the Notre Dame fire led to the usual “iT wUZ teRRurIzm” howling from the usual suspects from the alt-right, with Michael Savage, Jesse Lee Peterson and Mindy Robinson all being quick to tweet that out while Paul Joseph Watson spammed the exact same tweet accusing Buzzfeed of lying a dozen times in the space of an hour that somehow didn’t trigger Twitter’s spam filters, but the prize turkey has to be Glenn Beck for his assertion that it was Islamic terrorists who started the fire but we aren’t ever going to hear about it, which is the perfect example of Morton’s Fork but certainly not a good example of a reasoned, coherent argument supported by facts or evidence

With the Easter weekend approaching both The Sun and Daily Mail needed something, anything, in order to tide their readers over for a potential long weekend without their constant dogwhistling - which has to be the only logical explanation for running the story that Diane Abbott was seen drinking a tinned mojito on the train, which only led to it being unearthed that Mike Neville had, prior to photographing people sitting on trains having a tipple, was kicked out of the police for sharing far-right material

The only conclusion you could reach after watching the BBC coverage of the Spanish election was that the far-right Vox party had won, given how the headlines and so much of the piece was devoted to them and their supporters - when in actuality Vox finished fifth, while the Spanish Socialist Worker’s Party (PSOE) not only won the election but also won the popular vote with 3m more votes than the second-place People’s Party (and almost three times more votes than the fifth-placed Vox) while also picking up a majority in the Senate with 139 of 265 seats

To the surprise of absolutely nobody WWE responded to John Oliver tearing down their widely-known use of “independent contractor” status for wrestlers under contract with the company and the complete lack of health insurance they receive by...not addressing anything he said on those subjects and instead talking about their Wellness Program, which implies that WWE really aren’t too familiar with how the Streisand Effect works

Keeping within the WWE bubble we have “Superstar” Billy Graham making a really helpful suggestion to Kofi Kingston ahead of WrestleMania 35 that, if he wants to look credible, he needs to use steroids - and in the wake of widespread condemnation for making such an idiotic suggestion, Graham did what any sensible person would do - double down on his idiocy by saying that, just because he said Kingston should use steroids, he didn’t mean he should abuse them

Although it does appear that McGregor’s general shitehousery did inspire at least one fighter to follow in his footsteps, which is probably the most logical explanation for Zachary Madsen thinking the best idea to advance his career in the whole wide world would be to assault Bret Hart during the WWE hall of Fame ceremony

It seems that Sky News’ newsreaders really aren’t a happy bunch lately judging by their recent interviews with people outside their increasingly insular bubble, first with Jayne Secker laying in to somebody critical of Article 21 by being patronising and condescending and attempted to turn the interview into an attack on all letters that definitely didn’t make it worth mentioning that Secker is a multiple property landlord herself, soon followed by Adam Boulton harrumphing his way through a trainwreck of an interview with a member of Extinction Rebellion where he huffed and puffed about “incompetent, middle class, self-indulgent people” without a hint of irony as well as trotting out the old chestnut of the left sounding like right-wing fascists...and seemed surprised when the interviewee walked out on him - which led to Sky producer Thomas Newton acting like a smug tosser on Twitter about it while echoing Boulton’s non-arguments

Not wanting to be left behind, the BBC unleashed Nick Robinson to kvetch to another member of Extinction Rebellion how his morning commute is far more important than the climate or the planet’s long-term future

Glorified Twitter trolls Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman hit on a novel idea to politically engage people: by offering people money to falsely accuse Democrat nominee Pete Buttigieg of sexually assaulting them

Already the butt of a constant stream of jibes over Anthem things got worse for Bioware when a Kotaku article revealed the hellish working conditions at the studio during the game’s development cycle that led to numerous members of the team needing to take weeks or months off due to stress-related issues, some of them leaving altogether, yet the company not only had a blase attitude to these issues at the time but responded to the article with a boilerplate statement that focused entirely on one inconsequential point of the article and ignored the more serious allegations altogether

It appears that Nancy Pelosi thought she had too much credibility judging by her decision to hold a meeting discussing the rise of antisemitism with the credibility devoid trio of Ian Austin, Mike Gapes and Chris Leslie - because apparently Rachel Riley, David Baddiel and Matt Lucas were unavailable

So Wayne Hennessey hit upon a brilliant defence for being caught performing a Nazi salute: claim he had no idea what a Nazi salute even was - which somehow The FA accepted, in spite the claim being even less credible than his previous attempt at denying it where he was merely waving at somebody while covering his mouth so they could hear them which just so happened to look like Basil Fawlty entertaining the German guests at his hotel, and the fact that Hennessey has previous for doing the same gesture

Does it need to be explained that Julian Assange is not and never has been a journalist? I have to ask, since Julian Assange’s fanboys have been howling that their narcissistic god being dragged out of the Ecuadorian embassy is a freedom of the press violation. And that’s the most credible argument they’re trotting out, because they soon devolve into conspiracy theorist drivel after that...

According to Liz Truss the customs union bill lost by more votes than Theresa May’s Britiait proposal...somehow ignoring that the customs union bill lost by just eight votes, while May’s lost by 58 - and I’m sure this will be brought up for the next two years just like Diane Abbott flubbing her figures back in 2017 was...

Having spent the whole of March loudly telling everyone they didn’t understand the offside rule, after losing to Everton Arsenal fans decided now was the time to loudly proclaim they don’t understand what a foul throw is either

And last but by no means least, still finding it difficult to accept that when a report states numerous times you attempted to obstruct the course of justice that does not mean you are cleared on all charges is the inventor of flying water tankers Donald Trump who devoted a lot of time and energy into his oh-so-charming decision of using footage of 9/11 so he could harass Ilhan Omar on Twitter

#dickheads of the month

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writetohell · 7 years

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A Night Out

And it was here, lying on her tummy on the oak branch, flattening herself inward like a moth at rest, that Elena really thought to herself and succumbed to the question that had settled at the back of her mind some three or so days ago: how much longer could I go without sleeping?

The answer (as she had Googled sometime after the 34th hour) would be around 11 days if she were competing with the world record.

At first it seemed neat, like a medal of endurance, when the bursts of creative energy that winded her at 3 AM came to fruition. And then the headaches set in, the blurring figures, the strange ticking jitters that convulsed in her fingers and eyelids like the steady countdown of a time bomb. But if we’re being honest, Elena couldn’t give two shits about her own symptoms. This was personal.

Her sleep had been stolen from her.

She wasn’t the first, and god knows it was to be expected, judging by the fresh flyers posted around campus at the start of each semester.

GIVE YOURSELF A BREAK – THE KANASHI KNOWS WHEN YOU PULL ALL-NIGHTERS.

EVEN A CAT NAP CAN KEEP THE KANASHI AWAY! STAY AWAKE RESPONSIBLY.

There were even mandatory seminars as a part of all incoming students’ orientation, warning them about the Kanashi and what to do if a Kanashi ever haunted you.

“They crave leftovers and Doritos,” the speaker, a muscly blond specimen sporting a visor whilst indoors, had instructed. “Really, any kind of midnight munchies you might think of, but Doritos are said to be a favorite.”

All Elena had in her pantry was a stale, half-eaten bag of the limited edition cheeseburger flavor. Now it sat on the dirt below her, her feeble attempt at bait looking like a lazy scrap of litter.

But she hadn’t had time to go to the store. Elena hadn’t had time to do practically anything since the school year started much less hunt down a sleep demon.

Elena looked down at her phone. 4:24 AM. The chiming from the clock tower had long since been silenced. She rubbed at her face, trying to shake off the ultraviolet splotches creeping into her peripherals.

Mom couldn’t know about it. She’d spent all of Elena’s high school career trying to beat this sort of thing out of her, having endured the same type of self-torture for the sake of her own parents.

“Your grandmother wouldn’t let me settle for less than perfection,” Elena’s mother had told her over their last dinner together before she left for college. “I didn’t want you to feel that type of pressure. You’re absolutely perfect the way you are, even if you don’t get all As.”

“I like getting all As,” Elena said, not looking up from her plate. “I like being successful.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Mom said. “Just don’t kill yourself for it.

The conversation felt backwards to Elena, and made the pancit in her mouth taste sour. She expected more congratulations, more accolades … Not all this fussing

Mom was not an I-told-you-so kind of person, but she’d certainly shake her head at the sight of Elena now, steadying a line of copper wire between her fingers as she waited in cautious quiet, low in the oak tree.

Leaves crunched.

Elena started, almost toppling her phone over.

The pink-robed figure sidled closer from behind the gnarled trunk of another oak. It looked like a woman witch a hunched back so severe the peak of her spine seemed as if it were drawn by a magnet drifting overhead. Her pale hair was dark at the roots and shrouded her face. She rubbed at her arms as she drew closer, her nails long and painted in complementing shades of crimson. Elena doubted her prey right up until the woman launched her hands into the awaiting Doritos bag like she was diving fist first into a black hole of never ending snackage.

When Elena imagined this moment, she saw herself dropping to the ground with professional assassin-like prowess, sticking the landing like Iron Man, crouching close to the earth with a smarmy smile, ready to engage in epic combat with the Kanashi.

But, of course, she plummeted downward like a dead finch, made an embarrassing squealing noise all the short way down, and landed on her back.

Elena and the Kanashi shared a half second of eye contact.

The Kanashi’s eyes were what gave her away: they were bulbous, took up half of her loose-skinned face, and swam with huge black pools of pupils. It was a scary sight, but Elena might have thought it scarier if the Kanashi had eyelids big enough to blink with.

The Kanashi made a noise like a balloon deflating and whirled into a run, Doritos bag in hand.

“Not today, bitch,” Elena said under her breath, trying so hard to sound like Bruce Willis, but of course only sounding like an emaciated pixie.

Elena scrambled onto her feet and sprinted as fast as her fatigued body could go. She barreled forward through the forest, almost tripping several times, chasing the Kanashi like they were in a Looney Toons special. But despite her short knobby legs, the Kanashi had the head start. Elena needed to get the jump on her or else risk losing altogether, and missing another night of sleep.

In a moment of dire decisions, as they began to roll downhill toward the park limits and closer to the road where the Kanashi would surely be able to lose Elena in the sparse traffic, Elena gave all her gravity toward her downward trajectory, leaping toward the Kanashi.

The crest of her flight held for an inhuman amount of time wherein Elena transcended planes and sprung into thoughts of her childhood, when school first became difficult. She struggled with her multiplication tables in the third grade, and had to see her teacher after school for extra tutoring. When she heard it, she cannot remember, but remembers this one whisper so clearly like a racist little Jiminy Cricket that sat on her shoulder and shoved his nose into her ear.

“I thought Asians were supposed to be good at math.”

Later her white friends would tell her it was a compliment, that it was good racism™? And when she would argue with them, the words would get caught in her throat as they never seemed to grasp what exactly was wrong. Elena pushed herself a little more with each academic year since that first remark as if to say, you want me to box me up? You want me to be smart? Fine. I’ll make all of you look like dumbasses.

Maybe it was the wind in her face as she fell forward. Maybe it was just another symptom of her sleep deprivation. But in that frame right before she landed on the Kanashi, Elena blinked away the tears welling up in her eyes.

Elena fell into the Kanashi like a dead emu.

The landing hurt both of them, but Elena’s exhausted ass pinned the Kanashi to the ground and gave her enough time to wrap the copper around the Kanashi’s wrist.

“Untie me, you lousy shit!” The Kanashi pounded her untethered knuckles into the grass while Elena took a seat on the grass next to the demon. The Kanashi tried to stand up several times, and each time was weighed down by the copper wire around her right wrist so severely that she dropped headfirst into her own ankles.

“Give me my sleep. Now.” Elena felt almost drunk with exhaustion, rolling through these moments in dreary step-by-step flickers.

“Go to hell,” the Kanashi screeched.

As per seminar instructions, Elena then began singing.

“Good morning, starshine! The earth says, hello!”

The Kanashi grappled at her own ears. “Fuck you! No!”

“You twinkle above us! We twinkle below!”

“FINE! Take it! Just fucking take it!”

The Kanashi held out her palm for Elena to see. A compacted ball of sand teetered in the center, glittering in the full moonlight.

Elena plucked it out of the Kanashi’s hand, and cut the wire on her wrist with the pliers she’d stowed away in her back pocket.

The Kanashi propped herself up in a sitting position, pulling her rosy robe in tight before retying the belt. “Now do us both a favor and just get some shitting sleep, you dumb as shit shithead.”

“Did you ever go to college?” Elena tested.

The Kanashi huffed and folded her arms, looking defiantly back at Elena with those yawning black eyes. “You don’t get out much, do you shithead?”

Elena gestured at the Kanashi with her other hand. “What would you call this?”

The Kanashi had had enough small talk. She got up and turned on a heel without another word, misting back into the darkness of the low-lying trees from where they had met.

Elena tightened her grip around her little ball of sleep, feeling it roll along her knuckles all the way back to her car. With the doors locked and the seat reclined, she let it hover over her lips, grains of sand sprinkling on her chin, contemplating what consuming one’s own sleep must taste like, before her phone buzzed into life.

She dug it out of her pocket and squinted at the screen to read it.

“AMERICAN LIT RESEARCH BIBLIOGRAPHY.”

It was a preliminary alarm. The assignment was due in five hours.

Elena sighed. She kissed the ball of sleep between her fingers and stuffed it in her glove compartment before driving back to campus.

#write to hell #writing #modern fantasy #urban fantasy #fantasy #short story #prose #sleep

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splinterend · 5 years

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Movie Minutiae: Notes on Top 10 Films

I revisit my top 5 and 10 films periodically, and sometimes I write notes like the following.

29 August 2017, 8:00am PDT

It’s interesting to see what has fallen off since I first wrote a note back in March. Unsurprisingly, “The Dark Knight” fell off first – as I’ve learned more over the years, Christopher Nolan has become less and less appealing in that he is a remarkable technician with little to no ideology (save a rare stance in “The Prestige”) – as well as “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Beauty and the Beast.”

“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” fell off because after re-watching it, I realized that Joel is an abusive shit ass to Clementine, and I wasn’t having any of it.

“Beauty and the Beast” was replaced by “Ratatouille” after I remembered how much more influential Bird’s culinary classic was in shaping my sense of film criticism, as well as inspiring me to pursue filmmaking despite actual and perceived barriers.

“Inglourious Basterds” came into top 10 (to be honest, I’m not sure why it wasn’t in my initial list; maybe forgetfulness?) because Christoph Waltz’s venomous and alluring portrayal of a polite Nazi is haunting. Sally Menke’s editorial decisions make this film stand out for me in more ways than one (e.g. reimagining and reengagement with history and the implications of such pursuits), and most notably the scenes between Shoshanna and Frederick as they seemingly come off as ‘meet cute’ but are clearly underlined with severe issues of power dynamics (e.g. racism, militarism, patriarchal entitlement, etc.)

My top 10 films – with two honorary mentions that are basically “honorary number 10s” - are films that resonate with me for reasons related to filmmaking (philosophical and technical) and personally. These are the films that I will rewatch and learn something with each subsequent viewing.

#1: The Grandmaster [2013] - dir. Wong Kar-wai: I doubt this will leave my #1 spot for the next few years, if ever. The Grandmaster not only accomplishes philosophical and technical feats that have hugely influenced me as a filmmaker and individual, but it also holds a special place in my memory – specifically, the time, space, and circumstances under which I saw it alone in the Sundance Kabuki Theater in San Francisco.

#2: The Tale of Princess Kaguya [2013] - dir. Isao Takahata: Takahata’s watercolor dreamscape doesn’t detract from his obvious anger at how society and sexism can render the most pure-hearted, beautifully enthusiastic child into depression and entrapment. A beautifully and personally haunting film that never fails to wreck me at the end of each viewing (see: bawling).

#3: Paprika [2006] - dir. Satoshi Kon: Over the years, it’s become more and more obvious how utterly perfect of a film “Paprika” is: its explorations of personas, of perceptions, of power, of personalities, and of psyche – really, everything about it becomes more and more profound over the years. Atsuko’s struggle of accepting her own desires in contrast to societal barriers (see: sexism, misogyny) is something that’s become more and more pronounced over the years.

#4: The Wind Rises [2013] - dir. Hayao Miyazaki: Miyazaki’s film highlights the crux of his philosophical struggle: pursuing dreams, and the curse that comes with them. The titular character, Jiro Horikoshi, grapples with his own genius and the ensuing responsibilities that come in creating a machine of death – a beautiful machine, but a machine of death nonetheless.

#5: Moonlight [2016] - dir. Barry Jenkins: Like I mentioned in my previous note, I’m unsurprised that Jenkins’ masterpiece knocked “Minority Report” from top five. I’ve only seen this film once, and even then I know it’s nothing short of a masterpiece. Every note, every beat, every scene is perfect; it’s only an added bonus that Jenkins drew heavily from one of my favorite directors, Wong Kar-wai.

#6: Minority Report [2002] - dir. Steven Spielberg: This film is one of the most influential movies that made me consider the intersection of entertainment and implications that science fiction can explore (Tom Cruis notwisthanding). Janusz Kaminski’s cinematography work is something I frequently refer back to whenever I’m in an inspirational rut; the neo noir shots are truly something to behold.

#7: Inglourious Basterds [2009] - dir. Quentin Tarantino, edited by Sally Menke: Honestly, I don’t know why this didn’t make my original top 10 list. Waltz’s polite Nazi mannerisms and Menke’s attention to detail in underlying the inherent power dynamic that Shoshanna faces while dealing with a persistent Frederick are more than enough to propel Tarantino’s WWII romp into what I consider an extremely influential film. (Also, strudel.)

#8: Mad Max: Fury Road [2015] - dir. George Miller, edited by Margaret Sixel: This is effectively a nonstop car chase that is an amazing technical feat, much in thanks to Sixel’s editing. Theron’s performance as the steely Furiosa is one that I turn to whenever I’m having an extremely bad day (read: it’s dick stomping time).

#9: Ratatouille [2007] - dir. Brad Bird: I saw this movie right before beginning my undergrad, and Anton Ego’s final speech – “not everyone can be a chef, but a great chef can come from anywhere” – was a much needed moment during a time of uncertainty. I was struggling to find an intersection between my love of film and humanitarian work, as well as the barriers (institutional, financial, and perceived) that barred me from more seriously pursuing film. Bird’s culinary crusade is both heartwarming – Patton Oswalt’s Remy is adorable as they come – and heavily critical of the necessary and tumultuous relationship between creator and critic.

#10: In the Kingdom of Dreams and Madness [2013] - dir. Mami Sunada: I’ve watched this documentary once, and it has haunted me for months. Sunada’s attention to detail and ability to capture Miyazaki’s working ethos is something of a feat – the director is notoriously tight lipped, and to see how beautifully she interviewed and documented him as a phenomenal and flawed human being is inspiring and heartbreaking.

Honorary Mentions

Memories of Murder [2003] - dir. Bong Joon-ho: Bong Joon-ho is is one of my all-time favorite directors, and “Memories of Murder” is remarkable in how unbelievably grim and depressing it is. Joon-ho’s long takes and willingness to divulge in humor shape the film into an unbearably grim film. “Memories of Murder” is a narrative and technical feat, and it is unbelievably draining to watch.

Happy Together [1997] - dir. Wong Kar-wai: I suspect that this film will remain an honorary top 10 for a very long time given its understanding of how cyclical and alluring abusive relationships can be, as well as the dreary sense of isolation that comes with being an immigrant. It ends on a heart lifting moment where the protagonist breaks away from abuse through the inspiration and support from Chang, a truly kind and considerate individual, who runs contrary to his abusive, explosive and alluring ex-boyfriend. It is a film that understands abuse, and offers a glimmer of hope for those looking to escape it.

#top 10 films #2017 #movie minutiae

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