#but i also hate not being in with the cultural zeitgeist

[queenlua]

i know a guy who always shares with me what feels like The Correct Opinions On Current Media (If You Are An Insufferable Hipster In Brooklyn) ((I Say This With Full Love To All Insufferable Hipsters In Brooklyn, Rest Assured If I Lived In Your City I Would Be One Of You, Which Only Makes Me More Confused And Conflicted On The Matter))

anyway he keeps hyping up Poor Things. i am skeptical. does anyone else have opinions on Poor Things. which is a better use of my time: Poor Things or Jupiter Ascending (which i am told is trash but, like, fun trash)

[vexwerewolf]

Should I read homestuck

tl;dr: no

actual answer: yes, but with some extremely important caveats.

Firstly, because Adobe shitcanned Flash, you can now no longer experience Homestuck in the form it was intended upon release... unless you download the Unofficial Homestuck Collection. This act of unbelievable, nay, saintly generosity by Homestuck's most dedicated fans allows you to experience Homestuck as it was intended - as close as is humanly possible.

"As close as is humanly possible" is the key phrase here. One indelible part of the original Homestuck experience was UPDATE! Homestuck would sometimes go weeks or even months (and later, years) between updates. I wasn't on Tumblr back in the day, but at the peak of Homestuck, even if you knew nothing else about it, you'd know when an update dropped because Tumblr's net traffic would increase something like three to fourfold. People would go apeshit bananas about whatever new revelations the Huss would drop on us.

You also need to realise that Homestuck is a product of its time and while its takes on sexuality and gender identity was pretty progressive (for its time), Huss did use the r-slur a bunch.

While we're on the subject of the author, Andrew Hussie (of whom my current understanding is that they have not changed name but go by they/them nowadays) is, in the most diplomatic possible terms, a very unique person. They are, at times, a visionary storyteller with genuinely fascinating ideas. At other times, they come off as kinda spiteful towards their readers.

Without meaning to dip into spoilers, some story beats seem (in my opinion) almost intentionally calculated to upset, irritate or mock certain fans. It never rises to the sheer vicious contempt that Steven Moffat had towards Sherlock's fanbase, but it does leave a bad taste in my mouth whenever I go back.

Additionally, and this is where a sort of birds-eye-view spoiler is unavoidable, the story suffers from the Game of Thrones pitfall of repeatedly increasing its own complexity by adding new plot threads without resolving existing ones, eventually leading to fatigue on the part of both the reader and the author. The arcs of a lot of characters just straight up get abandoned, while a couple of characters take an unnecessarily large amount of screen time.

There's one character in particular that the author openly states within the narrative (the author exists within the world of the story. It's... a whole thing) that they favour, and whose behaviour the story is warped to accommodate. You'll know exactly who I'm talking about almost the moment they show up.

Another reason I say that it's not really possible to read Homestuck as it was originally intended is because a lot of the shit that happens in it fits into the zeitgeist of the internet at the time any individual update was written. There's a whole section in the late middle third that is inextricably and very specifically tied to how it was like to use Tumblr in 2012.

Additionally, a lot of things have soured with time. There was the whole Hiveswap debacle (it was first announced in 2012. We got the first act in 2017. We got the second act in 2020. We do not even know if the third act will ever come out.). There were the legal threats. There were the Epilogues and Homestuck 2, which were... how do I put this? Not universally liked. There's been nearly a decade of discourse since Homestuck ended, and a lot of things haven't grown better with age.

All of that being said.

You should read it.

I cannot express to you just how big an impact Homestuck has had on internet culture. Even people who claim to hate Homestuck unconsciously use slang that it invented. Its unique ideas on storytelling, character design and narrative chronology have, in both subtle and unsubtle ways, changed the way millennials and Gen Z tell stories.

A lot of people were inspired to tell stories because of Homestuck - one example I always give to Lancer players is that Kill Six Billion Demons started as a comic on the MSPA forums (before it was homestuck.com, it was MS Paint Adventures), so Homestuck is in an indirect but demonstrable way responsible for the existence of Lancer. The sunglasses that Gideon Nav from the Locked Tomb wears have been explicitly stated by Tamsyn Muir to be Dave Strider's. Toby Fox made music for Homestuck, and worked on large parts of Undertale while living in Andrew Hussie's basement.

We also know someone in the Bluey creative team is a Homestuck, because...

There are subtle but direct references in Bojack Horseman, Hazbin Hotel, Steven Universe, Adventure Time - and those are just the ones that it's easy to prove! In a more general sense, I think there's a lot of cartoon series, movies, games, etc. that would either be very different or wouldn't exist if Homestuck hadn't happened.

It's certainly influenced my work.

I think, being very cautious to manage your expectations, that you should read Homestuck. At the very least, a lot of things people say on Tumblr will start to make, if not sense, a different kind of nonsense.

[spirantization]

I'm surprised at the hate that Sokka's character arc from NATLA is receiving. To me, Sokka's development and characterization was one of the strongest adaptations the series made.

In the original ATLA, Sokka's character arc revolves around him unlearning his own misogyny. He makes pointedly sexist comments throughout the early episodes like "Leave it to a girl to screw things up!", "There's no way a bunch of girls took us down!", etc.

Sokka's comments have a strong narrative purpose: they give a platform for women in the show (Katara & Suki mostly) to refute his attitude. Katara emphasizes traditional "women's work" (cleaning, cooking, sewing, etc), which forces Sokka to confront its inherent value. Suki is able to prove to him that women can fight too and he learns to respect female warriors. It's a great character arc and it's well-executed.

It's also characterization that is in direct response to the culture and feminism of the 90s and early 00s. The representation of women in the media at that time was...oof. It was not great. One-dimensional love interests whose only purpose is being saved by the male protagonist, mostly. Female protagonists were not as common, and certainly not ones who were depicted as being able to fight, and certainly not in cartoons. Female protagonists in animation were almost exclusively princesses.

ATLA was progressive in this regard. Katara was a complex female character in a time when there were not a lot of them, in media in general but especially in animation and kid's shows. (I grew up in the 90s; there were no characters like Katara in animation on screen for me.) ATLA incorporated the zeitgeist directly into the story, which is why we have Sokka learning to overcome his sexism in his interactions with Strong Female Characters.

If you go back and watch the original cartoon now, Sokka's sexism feels a bit dated. It's a very 90s, Girl Power, "girls can fight too" style of social commentary. It doesn't match with the media landscape of today. We've got 20 years of media with female superheroes behind us. If your message is "girls can fight too!" the response for the most part is going to be "yes, we know that. And?"

So imagine you're adapting the original ATLA for a live-action remake. You want to keep Sokka's character arc intact, but you want to update it for the 2020s. So what do you do? You look at the conversations that are happening today.

The 90s were about "girls can do everything boys can do", but the 20s are over that. The conversation is more about gender: gender expression, gender roles, gender dynamics. What does is mean to be a woman? What does it mean to be a man?

Sokka's character arc in NATLA is focused on this question: What does it mean to be a man? At the beginning of the series, it's his identity as a warrior that defines him. He needs to be the warrior, the protector, the leader. He's constantly trying to reaffirm this part of his identity, and it's completely tied up in his perception of his value as a man. Instead of his interactions with Suki being about "how could girls possibly be warriors", it shifts to Sokka saying "I'm ALSO a warrior" and trying to justify that to Suki (and mostly himself).

His arc over the series is about him accepting other aspects of himself and relearning how to define his masculinity. He can still have value as man without being the greatest warrior. He can still have value as a man by using his skills as an engineer. He can still have value as a man by offering compassion and kindness to others, like the little girl with the doll & Yue in her final moments. Instead of rigidly defining himself by a specific set of gender roles & expectations, he learns how to define himself through his own strengths and qualities.

I know there are a lot of people who are upset at this change to Sokka's characterization, and the most common thing I see is that it results in changes to Katara's character and her anger in response to Sokka's comments. I think there are valid criticisms to be made about how the show handled the adaptation of Katara's character, but I won't go there with this. In terms of Sokka and his characterization, it was well-done and thematically consistent with the original. It's not an exact port, and it never needed to be. It's still a feminist arc that centres on unlearning harmful misogynistic worldviews, but the focus has shifted from external (roles of women) to internal (his role as a man). And his journey is one that people would benefit from seeing represented.

[thebibliosphere]

Hey, this is just an fyi but over on instagram I’ve been seeing accounts that basically just steal content here via screen caps.

I usually roll my eyes and move on, or go see if I can follow a cool tumblr account, either way.

BUT why am I unsurprised to find one that has a whole bunch of tumblr folks I already follow.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cu9ZXXSy4y_/

I figure your probably already have seen this kind of nonsense, but since they’re clearly not linking back to tumblr … anyway. OY with this garbage.

I feel like I should make a post about it and @ all the accounts mentioned but I don’t want that bot account to pester anyone either. Meh. I hate everything / we can never have nice things, etc.

Thanks for the heads up. Some of them tag my bibliosphere insta sometimes. Honestly that's just as annoying because then I get notifications for all the comments x_X

Pretty much all of social media is populated with stolen screenshots from Tumblr at this point. There are TikTok influencers getting money from the creator fund, and all they do is read Tumblr posts.

YouTubers also get ad revenue from doing the same thing.

Tumblr is pretty much the only place that doesn't profit from Tumblr being the zeitgeist for a lot of popular meme culture.

[submalevolentgrace]

for pretty much my entire life we have been locking up refugees in UN-certified human-rights-violating "offshore detention" camps for the heinous crime of daring to try and flee from death and worse, often from wars-on-terror we've helped wage, and have very much done highly decorated war crimes in. we hold them in conditions so bad that war-fleeing refugees have sown their mouths shut, tried to starve themselves, even children trying to kill themselves to escape what we're doing to them. WE are doing. because in my boots on the ground activism days i tried to fight the government on this, and the fact is, the australian public on the whole doesn't give a shit about us torturing refugee kids, half the country is in support of it, so the government gets a free pass no matter which side is in power. from howard to rudd to gillard to rudd to abbott to turnbull to morison to albanese, we lock up and torture refugees. the UN anti-torture inspectors aren't allowed to visit. the camps are run by a private USA prison contractor now.

and it's not like we can't organise a protest! we'll barricade MP's offices because of something an ally-in-law country is doing that we condemn, but when the blood is on our hands we don't wanna know, don't wanna fight, don't wanna admit. and albanese gets up there and says those barricades have "crossed a line", "there's no place for violence like this in our democracy", he says. you know where there is an implicit place for violence, apparently? cops beating indigenous kids to death on camera, the australian people are fine with that apparently. happens all the time. better have a curfew so those kids don't get too rowdy about it!

oh and the CIA agents and US soldiers we welcomed here to supposedly defend us, they rape a bunch of women and children, mostly also indigenous? better get ASIO and the AFP to monitor the population for anti-american sentiment, local cops do it plenty too and we can't stand up to the USA, we're about to go to war with our biggest economic trading partner on their behalf, the troop buildup locations have already been announced! sweep it under the rug little aussies, scrub it from your memory, who cares about raped children anyway? not worth protesting, apparently.

we are right in the middle of the asia-pacific, with loosely speaking about a 5th of the population ethnically or culturally asian, and they are absolutely terrified of speaking out about how many hate crimes they suffer constantly, because the other 80% of the population is more culturally invested in american politics than the fact that labor considers pauline hanson an ally. i don't blame the 20% getting hatecrimed for being scared to speak up, i sure as fuck blame the rest of us for not protecting them, and for doing those hate crimes. "wE'rE a MuLtIcUlTuRaL sOcIeTy!! nO rAcIsM hErE!!", but we'll organise citywide marches in the middle of a pandemic if a black american kid gets killed over there, and then tell blak people they're spelling it wrong.

then we flood the region with our white-bleached propaganda and "culture", to control smaller governments and and lure the people of the region here for our economic benefit; the wealthy as fodder to fund the education complex, and the poor to work below-minimum-wage-slavery "jobs programs" on our great proud aussie battler family run farms.

it's all out in the open. the torture, the murder, the rape, the hate crimes, the technically-it's-legally-distinct-from-slavery, it's all known, all reported regularly on the news, endlessly, cyclically, every few months or years, for my whole life. fuck knows what else we're doing and i don't know about because pine gap prevents it from reaching english language news.

i know the internet zeitgeist really only cares about the single latest trending topic to happen, so you're wondering what that is to make me react enraged and ashamed; but it's everything. i haven't even scratched the surface, just ranting off the top of my head.

every day i carry the shame of what a disgusting violent colony nation this is; to the people who consider themselves australian, to the people here before the nation and their descendants, to the people surrounding us now. i carry the guilt of failure to stop it, and casual complicity of having given up the fight because i couldn't handle it. i think that's what most activists do here, give up in shame, because activists aren't fighting the government - we have one of the most free and open democracies in the world, and the spineless cowards in charge absolutely will do what the populace whims of them - activists here are fighting the cruel and apathetic average australian, who either don't care, or active condone it all. we have the blood of this country on our hands.

so.

what has australia done now?

it's fucken wednesday, mates. nothing new.

[strawbeerossi]

Could you write a Spencer Reid x fem reader who's a witch and she gets Spencer to join in on her rituals/gives him readings etc and at first he's sceptical (joins in anyway for her) but then ends up secretly enjoying it, something along those lines!

Stars Align

Pairing: Fem!Reader x Spencer Reid

Description: Spencer likes to give his girlfriend a hard time when it comes to her spirituality and her Wiccan beliefs. Whenever she is sick and in the hospital for The Winter Solstice, Spencer takes things into his own hands to ensure that he invites only the warmest, most positive vibes of the season.

Content Warning: Mention of being hospitalized, mentions of Spencer being a brat and giving reader a hard time sometimes, ultimately just a big, sweet, fluffy mess.

Word Count: 1.5K

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I did it just a little differently from the ask but I hope you enjoy, anon!

A witch is an ambiguous symbol of power and the unknown, identified in pop culture references for their hate of kids and love of evil as much as for their capability to create and mend.

Witches have consistently reflected the zeitgeist, whether that be humanity’s views on women or the collective tie to ritual and magic. 

A witch in the modern day promotes a strong sense of feminism and power. It is deeply rooted in personal empowerment and is heavily influenced by the culture each witch has been subjected to. Currently, women who loved the wonders of spirituality, witchcraft and the connection to the universe had a relatively new title; Wiccan.

The enchantment of magic is that when it's truly personal, it's most powerful and possesses the greatest strength. That was simply why Y/N participated in the art of Wicca. Growing up with the negative connotations that her family projected onto the lifestyle, she had always been curious. 

It started out small, she went out one evening and bought crystals, feeling bewitched by the healing prospect surrounding them.Amethysts were her favorite for the power to have all her stress and anxiety melt away. As she continued to exercise her spirituality, she’d turned to reading numerous books on the subject.

She felt a surge of power go through her veins, feeling connected to a higher power that was much stronger than she could’ve imagined. While religion was somewhat of the same thing, this seemed so much better than what she was raised with. It was a personal journey, one that didn’t involve people at local churches or other sacred worship places.

In addition to her adventures into reading the numerous pieces of literature and delving more into the healing aspect, she also thoroughly enjoyed the rituals that came with Wiccan culture. She was particularly fond of the Summer Solstice and the Winter Solstice. The celebrations were things she took very seriously. 

For example, in preparation for Yule, she would spend days cleansing and decluttering the apartment, wanting to rid anything that didn’t let positivity and vibrance shine in the little space that she called home.

However, moving in with Spencer, her longtime boyfriend, definitely changed some things up for her. Instead of freely organizing things to be donated, regifted, or sold, she would have to stop and ask him if he was comfortable letting the item or items go. He wasn’t against her beliefs and practices by any means but she just knew that he was skeptical. 

Spencer was a man of logic, she knew that. He was the type of person who thoroughly researched, dissected, and tried to understand the intricacies of the world around him. Which Y/N would lovingly tell him that he needed to take a step back and connect with the world around him, to let his mind stop working overtime and let himself breathe. He never listened but.. She tried and that was all that mattered. 

She was usually met with many questions that were laced with skepticism. It wasn’t out of malice, she knew that. Most people just didn’t understand. The questions were pretty typical. “Well, how do you know there are really any higher powers out there?”

“Where is the proof that you aren’t doing all this for nothing?”

“Do you truly believe that those crystals have any healing power whatsoever?”

Despite his love for logic and research, Spencer did have a soft spot for the things that his girlfriend did. He never personally indulged before and yeah, he would sometimes act like a little brat and give her a hard time, but he admired how she never changed her belief system. Instead, she just did a little extra around their shared apartment to try and invite her scholar boyfriend into the spirit of the season.

However, this year was different.

Y/N ended up getting a bad case of the stomach flu on the days leading up to Yule. It was to the point that she needed to be hospitalized.

There was no mood for a celebration whenever she was gravely ill, barely being able to hold down any liquids or solids. It managed to crush her heart though. Instead of welcoming the new season, she was stuck in a brightly lit, cold hospital.

She would watch the snow cascade from the clouds and stick to the ground from her room’s window, looking similar to a sad puppy looking out from a shelter’s window and yearning for the opportunity to run and enjoy life. 

Spencer had been busy with work, there being a case that put him out in Colorado for two weeks and she still didn’t know when he was getting home. Talking on the phone with him helped her a small bit but she was at least hoping that he’d be there in person for her.

However, she knew what she signed up for when dating Spencer in the first place. She couldn’t be angry or upset with him, she just missed her boyfriend. Thankfully, after a few more tests, she’d be free to go back home that evening since she wasn’t needing to be kept nourished by a tube any longer.

Unbeknownst to his girlfriend, Spencer had gotten back from Colorado several days ago, enlisting the team for help as they were working on her typical traditions. Penelope was probably the most excited out of the bunch, getting right to work on creating a Yule altar for the coffee table, going a little overboard as she opted for a plethora of garland, candles, oranges, some pinecones that she couldn’t help but throw a little glitter on, crystals, and golden discs to call forth the sunlight that she’d already heard Y/N tell her so much about. 

While she worked on the altar, Emily and JJ were sitting with Spencer in the living room, awaiting his instruction of what he figured would be considered clutter and what needed to be boxed up. Most of it was old books that he’d had scattered throughout the apartment, which he had taped up the box full and was taking them to the trunk of his car. He wasn’t going to throw them out, no way. He just knew that this would be something to brighten Y/N’s spirits, to come home to a house that was already prepped and ready to embrace the new season.

Whenever the house was thoroughly cleaned and decorated, Spencer had a few candles ready for when she had gotten home, their notepads and pens laid out on the little part of the table that wasn’t covered by the altar that was made with love. “Alright. I think that should do it.” Spencer announced as he was letting his hands rest against his hips, his eyes looking around the living room that looked beautifully cleaned, organized, and decorated. 

“You’ve outdone yourself on this one, Spence.” JJ commented, a proud smile on her face while Penelope was nodding with excitement. “She is truly gonna love that you did this for her. When I went to visit her yesterday, she looked so heartbroken because she couldn’t come home and prepare.” There was a sense of pride that washed over Spencer. 

Even if he didn’t necessarily subscribe to the Wiccan belief system, he did know that this would be a memorable Yule for Y/N, it also proved just how much he loved her. 

Whenever the women who came by to help were making their own ways home, Spencer was just patiently waiting to surprise his girlfriend, knowing she’d be getting home at any given minute since they’d already had a previous phone call as she was getting packed up to leave the hospital after four very long days.

It was a little silly, Spencer feeling so giddy. It felt like his heart was gonna beat out of his chest each time he saw a car’s windshield reflecting through the open window.

As soon as he could hear the sound of the locks in the door clicking through, he was quickly perking up. 

The look on Y/N’s face when she walked through the front door was enough to make his heart melt in his chest. “I haven’t been entirely truthful with you.. I got home a few days ago so I could clean the apartment. Even if I don’t particularly understand your beliefs, I wanted to make sure things were prepared for you.”

He offered a smile. “After all, we want to invite in the new season with positive vibes, right?” His words were enough to warm Y/N completely, the bitter cold of the Virginia winter not being able to chill her anymore. 

After closing the door, she was hurrying over to hug her boyfriend, a tight embrace that was borderline suffocating. This meant the world to her. Instead of him being a brat and asking her a million questions or outright teasing her, he was embracing everything she had to offer.

That was a sign of true, pure, and raw love.

[pop-punklouis]

the way the boys have slowly talked more and more about the one direction experience with more honest flares proves to be incredibly fascinating to me. you all know how intriguing the boyband machine has always been to me. so to see parts of that inner dynamic and the arc of that dynamic shift as they grew from normal teenagers to fleshed out young adults with their own interests and friends and goals and purpose etc. is not very unfamiliar with how friendships work as a whole as you get older. they were such wide-eyed teenagers struck with this pop cultural zeitgeist that sucked them up so feverishly as their fame skyrocketed that all they had was each other. they didn’t know anyone else and no one else knew what they were going through. as they grew older and fame wasn’t as fresh, they started becoming their own people who had unique influences and friend circles and hobbies that not only gave them dimension as a group but also separated them from the group in an environment where it’s so hard to lose yourself to being one instead of finding your own footing as an individual. it gave them healthy breathers between work and breaks, and i think as much as we love their dynamic together and their is always genuine love and friendship there, if they continued to only be stuck with each other like they were in the early days, they would’ve came out of the band absolutely hating each other instead of finding peace and comfort with this open-ended break. and ultimately, that’s the best case scenario to watch each other grow up as people. as friends. as kindred spirits. and encourage that even if splitting and going your separate ways means it’s an end of an era and you all won’t be the same as you were together. it’s not really outgrowing friendships it’s just knowing these people were significant in being the vessel to help you become your own person and you’ll always be made up of pieces of them.

regardless of how often they talk or how much the band felt like work near the end and a coworker dynamic overtook some of that space— creating a certain environment like louis touched on, there’s something to be said about clarity and honesty that i think they all have within one another to know it was time to go on especially after zayn’s departure instead of running themselves into the ground and tainting friendships and community that mean so so much to them and will always sit there between their chests. it’s never a goodbye with friends and bonds like that. no one will ever, ever be able to understand their coming of age story like the other four. there’s still such love there, but people are people and life happens to us all. i’d much rather them be where they are now than being locked into something where they end up tearing down the happy moments they found within each other back then through the dark times of the fame machine. so i think no matter what else happened on the surface. they’ve all come to a place where they can say it isn’t goodbye. it’s a see ya later. and with what they all went through, that’s the best case scenario to preserve their love for one another and the band as a whole.

[howlsmovinglibrary]

Hello! I saw your response to the "5 things you could talk about for an hour" tag game, and I just wanted to say that I am in fact very interested in your perspective on how fandom/fanfic has impacted media literacy and the publishing industry, if you'd ever like to yap on Tumblr about it!

hmmm... other people have said it better than me in various different tumblr posts but I'm a yapper why not?

(under the cut to save a long post)

fandom/fanfic impacts on media literacy:

media is viewed through shipping goggles first and a critical lens second (both of them are allowed! i love my shipping goggles! but i also like having multiple tools of analysis in my arsenal!)

this also sometimes means that media devolves into relationships and 'fan service' moments, above plot or delivery of a good and satisfactory story (I'm not saying OFMD but I kind of am. I'm not saying BG3 additional content that has focused on popular characters and ships above incomplete and underwritten narratives... but I kind of am)

because fandom now also has a big purity culture kick back, and fandom has become mainstream, that means mainstream media also has a purity culture kick back (for instance, everyone performing scandalised and 'disgusted' reactions to Saltburn, when actually all that is is a... psychological thriller)

fandom/fanfic impacts on the publishing industry:

the Locked Tomb's popularisation of fic-ish writing, alongside the reylo fanfic boom (Ali Hazelwood serial numbers filed off -> romance pipeline) kind of coincided perfectly with the pandemic. as did the success of Travis Baldree's coffeeshop AU, Legends and Lattes. people wanted comfort media, but at the other end, publishing industry professionals were working from home and likely spread thin. I think this created a perfect storm for 'fast fiction' (like 'fast fashion') where basically a fanfic can be quickly changed into a book with minimal editing that doesn't matter anyway bc it provides a dopamine hit. None of this is inherently bad. I don't dislike fanfic-to-published-novel on principle. What I *hate*, is bad editing. Extremely high quality editing is what trad publishing has, in a way fic doesn't. Bc fic can be as long as you want it to be, and can linger, and can have fun - it's not designed for efficiency or quality control bc that's not the point. that being said... quality control can, in fact, improve a work's quality. but trad publishing doesn't have good editing anymore, bc the pandemic proved it didn't necessarily need it, and publishing companies love to not spend money on things, especially if it will make them a profit without that care or attention.

what i will also say, is there is a reason it's easy to file the serial numbers off. reylo fics are very far from canon, for a number of reasons. Legends and Lattes is a coffeeshop AU, without any character work. This doesn't mean they are bad. It just means they feed into a general trend of 'fic as tropes' - rather than 'fic as character study', for instance - which in turn means that romance in particular has also become 'romance as tropes' (or even 'romance as smut' which is another thing I have feelings about, bc bad editing + fiction as smut = really, really bad smut actually lads)

in general 'fiction as tropes' has then obviously been aided by tiktok as the primary marketing platform. rather than provide an explanation of your story, providing an explanation of its tropes encourages your book being read this way

another thing that has happened as a result of fic is 'queer rep' as being 'there is queer people in it' or 'there is queer romance in it'. again, not inherently a bad thing. i love a gay book. but gay and queer experiences exist on a spectrum. a book with queer MCs for the sake of having queer MCs may end up feeling tokenistic, if the writer has included queer rep for the sake of queer rep, or (and we need to admit this happens!) to be trendy!! to hit on the 'queer rep' zeitgeist!!! similarly, a queer book without any romance in it can still be queer, but gods forbid we have *that* conversation.

As I said, all of these things have been discussed in tumblr posts far better than mine. In terms of my personal experience - teaching undergraduate literature classes, this is what I've noticed:

because of fandom or social media with fandom lite edges, a lot of my students are very up-to-date on things such as intersectional feminism, gender performativity, compulsory heterosexuality, queer coding, etc. I don't need to define these terms, whereas they were defined when I was an undergrad.

however, the flipside of this is they often approach the texts I teach only with a contemporary mindset. The biggest example I have of this is Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre actually benefits from a contemporary mindset - after being heralded as feminist in the 1960s, intersectional criticisms in the 1980s/90s by postcolonial critics called out its racist treatment of Bertha Mason. BUT if I have to read another essay about Jane Eyre's relationship with Rochester being 'problematic', I will scream. Not bc I don't agree, but because criticisms of this novel need to also acknowledge that in the victorian era, such a blatant discussion of female sexual desire was radical for its time. That class and sexism was a big enough issue in the 19th century that for Jane to get to marry a man from the landed gentry on equal footing was a big deal at the time. It's fine if you decide Jane Eyre isn't feminist! but you need to prove that through multiple critical lenses and not just a jezebel-article style treatise. (for instance, one essay critiqued the male gaze in Jane Eyre... Jane Eyre was written by a woman looking very disrespectfully actually, and also... film hadn't been invented yet. while the male gaze existed in art, the normalising of female objectification, sexually, required film. also... the male gaze is a term that requires a man with eyes to be making that piece of art.)

the other biggest problem I have when teaching, is the 'queer character as queer representation' thing, and ESPECIALLY "good queer representation means morally good queer characters'. I teach Giovanni's Room. Anyone who has read Giovanni's Room, knows that the main character is both gay... and a bad person. That book isn't just talking about being gay, but about being closeted, trapped in compulsory heteronormativity, and also... 1950s racism. One of the biggest challenges for me as a teacher is to ask students "don't just tell me there's gay people in it, look at what those gay people are doing. is queerness portrayed positively or negatively? what aspects of the experience are being represented? do these aspects have value, especially when it is a queer artist making the art?"

(people also feel like they can't call a gay character mean or bad, because of the whole 'gay is inherently virtuous' part of fandom's mindset. spoilers: gay people can suck too. and are allowed to be portrayed as such in fiction, once you have a tool in your toolkit known as nuance).

anyway, aside from the fact it means i occasionally struggle to find good romance books bc I want not just well written sex but character development - which fanfic has! I'm not saying fanfic doesn't have it! but the fanfic that gets published sometimes doesn't, and certainly very rarely has both! - my teaching is absolutely where I see fandom's impact most clearly.

[droumack]

think of jo in a different profession

ignore the fact i forgot the met gala is at the beginning of may ;-;

like high fashion model Jo, maybe Jo still plays with the mooseheads but gets badlly injured during their draft year and has to stop playing. jo ends up modeling, how i dont know but i would like to see Jo invited to the met gala and asking nate to come with him cause like imagine its when the avs have a break during that time or even before of after ASG.

like the met gala is before ASG and Jo manages to convince Nate to join him as his date. Also at the met gala natejo gives the vibes off jo can walk around in peace cause he has a guard dog behind him. also this gives such a big fuck you to gary bettman, like OH not only does one of the star players of the NHL come out to the world, he does it with his hot af model boyfriend at the fucking MET GALA.

also would be funny that no one knew nate is dating jo other than sid and their family, like no shit sid knows, probably fucking walked in on those two or some shit. Get Jo to fucking dress nate, its a FINALLY for Jo cause he got sick of this usual fits.

like ahhh, maybe like interviews jo did earlier he does talk about playing jr hockey and having to stop. people dig up like OH he was GOOD and would have been drafted high, but OH he also played with nathan mackinnon and they were great together. also see people asking jo and nate about each other.

also nate being Jo's fucking HAB (husband and boyfriend) at the met gala, being HIS ARM CANDY LIKE ABDANAFJIJKNAS, fucking meeting Jo's industry friends like PLEASE. this awkward hockey boy who joined his model boyfriend for his high profile event since this is maybe like the first time theyve also seen each other or been with each other for longer than a couple hours. also jo being a fucking HAB publicly during the avs playoffs like uhsfsbjfbjkjkb.

people to nate especially during ASG, "how the fuck did you bag Jonathan FUCKING Drouin?" " we played jrs together and kept in touch"

oh my GOD losing my mind over this. like it's literally a travis/taylor moment in the pop culture zeitgeist because jo is that guy.

jo 100% does not make nate stay the whole time at the MET, jo honestly kind of hates the MET and only goes because his publicist tells him he has to. they leave early and get on a plane so they can be home on time for nate to make the team plane the next day and they fuck on the private jet because nate thought jo looked really handsome :) and also he did not appreciate That One Actor who kept hitting on Jo like nate wasn't right there (and willing to kill him)

[herohimbowhore]

The One Direction to F1 Pipeline and Fan Culture

In contemporary fan spaces, we could make hundreds of connections between being a fan of X and becoming a fan of Y.

One Direction to Marvel (could also be 1D to MCU to F1)

Harry Potter to Game of Thrones

Disney to HBO

Gossip Girl to Marvel

The possibilities of making connections are endless.

However, to understand fan culture in spaces like Twitter (it will actually pain me to write X so it's Twitter) as we progress beyond just sports culture, we just need to look at the One Direction to F1 pipeline.

One Direction, despite only being a band for like five years and going on "hiatus" in January 2016, changed fandom forever and was a formative experience for so many current F1 fans under 30. Being a fan of One Direction has ingrained a fan culture within our zeitgeist.

While One Direction may not have a presence in fan spaces anymore, the behaviors that we learned from that period are still very much present.

So what behaviors of 1D fan culture are present in F1 fan culture?

Hacking security cameras and knowing things we probably shouldn't:

Now, am I in support of this? Not at all. I don't think you should be hacking and essentially stalking drivers or any celebrities, but that's a discussion for a different time.

But if anyone was even slightly aware of One Direction at their prime in the early 2010s, then you know that there was little that Directioners were not able to hack. (cough birth certificates and hospital records cough).

We can see that same behavior, especially when it comes to Charles Leclerc. Footage of him purchasing a suitcase was leaked. His address was leaked and fans showed up at his doorstep.

Which just reminds me of a story Louis once told where he tweeted about not having milk and some fan dropped off milk at his doorstep.

You can't have a favorite/You can't hate someone:

In hindsight, I think we can all agree that this idea was mostly promoted due to purchasing power.

There were five dolls for the five members. If you were a Harry girlie, you'd buy the Harry doll. If you were a Zayn girlie, you'd buy the Zayn doll and so on. However, the issue with this was that the Harry and Zayn dolls were flying off the shelf, you'd be hard-pressed to find them. The Niall and Louis girlies, while less than the Harry and Zayn girlies, were dedicated to Niall and Louis. Leaving the Liam dolls all alone on the shelves...

So, the you can't hate one member and be a true Directioner narrative was created.

And if you've spent even a few moments on f1twt, you'll be able to see a similar narrative in F1.

If you hate a driver or criticize them, then there's a high chance that at least a few people will call you a fake fan. Or you can't be a Ferrari fan if you like Charles and hate Carlos (or vice versa). Or how are you going to the paddock when you criticized one driver the previous year when they weren't on the team (iykyk).

But, I find this a bit disingenuous. Unlike One Direction, which was a band, F1 is a sport. You can have a favorite and dislike someone else. Criticism is actually a good thing (as long as you're not being hateful for no reason).

Fan Projects and Involvement/Analysis:

One Direction fans were known for the projects they had and for getting involved.

Wearing orange when they performed in the Netherlands during the Take Me Home tour

The "We Are 1D Family" signs from the 2014 San Siro concert

Lighting up the stadium with different colored lights

The No Control project

With F1, especially this year, there were the friendship bracelets. While popularized this year by Taylor Swift, is like the fan projects that we would see in the One Direction era.

Other aspects of this include looking at the driver onboards and making sure that information is shared online with others and analyzed.

Commentary and race direction don't focus on every single driver's race and often times things are missed or ignored. Fans looking through the data, videos, and everything else help shed light on how individual races went and correct public narratives. It's double checking if there was damage, impeding, driver error, car problems, etc.

Daniel's onboards and data from Austin and Brazil come to mind. Without that information, those wouldn't be considered great races for him. He was finishing behind his teammate. But onboards from Austin revealed that he had debris stuck in his front wing, which hadn't been mentioned by race commentators. In Brazil, while a lap down, he spent most of the race right behind Yuki playing the team game. If you didn't see the data, then you wouldn't know that's where he was on track or that he was 3rd fastest.

I would relate this to the fan projects centered around Louis, Niall, and Liam. Those were always about correctly attributing credit and giving attention to them when the media was focused on Harry and Zayn.

Making It Your Own:

There's no question that if you're a fan, you're going to want merch to support your favorites.

However, it's usually not so great.

One Direction fans were creating their own shirts and other items because not everyone wanted to walk around wearing a "Mrs. Styles" t-shirt or one with the album cover. Fan-created merch was filled with cool designs for clothing, custom shot glasses, posters, etc.

In F1, not only is most of the team merch filled with sponsors, but it's also insanely expensive. (I might love it, but I'm not spending $200 for a cardigan.)

Fans create a diverse and creative range of merch that is affordable. Fun t-shirts, stickers, jackets, posters, etc.

At the core essence of being a fan, is taking something and making it your own. Especially when it comes to bad, expensive merch (what was that 10 in a row shirt for Max???? or just about any team shirt with the hundred sponsors they have) and good, expensive merch (Daniel needs to stop putting out enchante collections. I am a grad student, I cannot keep affording them.)

[centrally-unplanned]

"Fear and the World and People and Me: What was the Phenomenon of 'Evangelion'?" Text & Translation of CB 1997 Essay by Junichi Tomonari

My first entry into the Comic Box End of Eva Translation Project!

The Comic Box Magazine opens with an introductory essay by Junichi Tomonari, a japanese literary critic and novelist who specialized in horror works (and is big into scuba diving and lives in Bali these days, apparently). His work focuses on bringing an outsider, sociological lens to Eva as a work of media and cultural phenomenon. I will list a few of my ‘interesting takeaways’ from the essay first for those who just want a glimpse, then I will post a link to the full translation on my blog

Tomonari’s interview is a time capsule of the 90’s zeitgeist of treating anime as sociological diagnostic for the times. He, hilariously, repeatedly, states how much he hates Shinji, and yet ‘sees in Shinji the youth of Japan’, a youth passive & hopeless, unable to act for themselves and withdrawing from society. This passivity is seen as dangerous, particularly in men, “...they will not be able to avoid looking at themselves objectively in relation to others. When this happens, they suddenly display a violent temperament.” He is not alone in thinking this - the 1989 “Otaku Killer” Tsutomu Miyazaki, the rise of the hikikomori as a sociological phenomenon, and other stories launched an entire wave of writings concerning the fate & struggles of Japan’s youth in the 90’s, often with the anime subculture as a focal point.

Tomonari sees himself as having moved past anime, loathing Shinji for his weakness, and judgemental of an audience obsessed with Eva. “If I were a junior or senior high school student and there was such a jerk in my class, I would definitely torment him to death.” But he grows to appreciate Shinji - and Eva - as a way to see the struggles of a new generation in a more empathic light than the contemproary wave of hand-wringing normally permits (and of course, the sentiments he expresses are likely literary exagerations to communicate his ideas). This interview adds to the stack of evidence we have of Evangelion being a focal point for this sort of discourse, expanding the parameters of the “otaku as sociological phenomenon” discussion for the wider public.

Something I do find quite revealing is how much Tomonari in 1997 is repeating what western anime fans would themselves embrace in the 2000’s - Shinji as pathetic, as someone who should “grow up and be a real man”. Its a pretty alien perspective today! Hating a protagonist for being anxious and having struggles, that is half of all protagonists, who doesn’t have those traits? The machismo of the male media culture of the 2000’s is pretty dead and buried, or at least morphed, protagonists with anxiety and trauma are relatable and revered. In our modern era we perhaps forget how new it is for traits like these to be so standard, for characters to be so ‘relatable’ in this way. This interview really sells you on how controversial a character Shinji-as-protagonist was in 1995 (and in Japan), something that is much harder to glimpse now.

Other interesting notes:

At one point during the discussion of modern youth’s latent violence, Tomonari comments “Across the world, there are probably very few cases of children committing such murders [and yet we see them in Japan]. Perhaps this will become a unique phenomenon in Japan”. Alas for all of us, this prediction did not age well.

He compares Evangelion to horror manga author Hideshi Hino’s “splatter horror” works and stylistic designs, which is right on the money as his manga “Dokumushi Kozou/Bug Boy” is actually cited in the production documents for Evangelion, such as this End of Evangelion storyboard:

He does take time to eviscerate Shinji for being a self-insert surrounded by beautiful women who all dote on him in one way or another and it is extremely funny, that trait is both one of Eva’s best parts and also totally true.

The interview is quite long, a bit too much for tumblr but has a lot of interesting facts - I have put my translation & even the OCR'd Japanese text up for anyone to read here on my blog, which I really do need to do a better job of cross-posting things. Hopefully it is of interest to some, and I aspire to continue translating the documents as much as I am able.

[majorbaby]

very very long rant

when i first left tumblr after the porn ban, the sjw stuff was starting to plateau, but you still had big bloggers ironically calling themselves misandrists in bio. I say ironically because unlike an open misogynist, an open misandrist cannot amass vast structural power, they instead will remain on the fringes of society. before they can even be shunned in the mainstream or the elite, they're being shunned by their own peers.

at that time, there was a lot of popular blogs run by (sometimes allegedly) racialized people or "poc-run spaces" like thisisnot[country] and blogs specifically dedicated to pointing out cultural appropriation. i personally contributed to the reclaimthebindi which in retrospect seemed inspired by blackout selfie day (not to be confused with thr subsequent 'blackout' posts associated with BLM - that was later), altho idk to what extent the south asian diasporic community (of which i am a part of) actually paid homage to the black blogger/s responsible for blackout day.

now many of those blogs are defunct or have been scrubbed from level-one searches of tumblr, and their history has not been well documented. it's hard to understand what the climate was unless you were there because not many secondary sources, like the one you're reading right now i suppose, exist. or they weren't well-circulated. this one won't be, i'm turning off reblogs i think.

this is, in my opinion, in contrast to other major trends in internet culture that inform offline social justice movements. that's your gxmxrgxte (so well-ingrained in my memory that it still upsets me enough to censor today), metoo and the annual around ao3's right to host any and all content with very limited few exceptions.

reclaimthebindi is still up, so are a few of the thisisnot blogs, but you can't really tell that they were all interconnected, a part of the same zeitgeist. i have a few theories as to why, and which one you pick depends on how generous you are when imagining the people who ran these blogs. some of them for sure were run by bored college students seeking an outlet. some of them were denied recognition by their offline peers because of racism, so it felt good to find a space where they could actually amass social capital on the basis of the very thing that disadvantaged them in every other space. some were concerned with punitive justice, others with restorative justice. some just posted black and brown bodies so that those images would exist on the internet somewhere. some were run by racefacing white people who also felt like outcasts offline, and saw a quick and easy way to be embraced elsewhere. it's possible that some people did it for a combination of these reasons.

whatever benefits there may have been, it wasn't enough to keep the momentum going. very few put out 'retirement' statements, most just stopped posting and were eventually purged. tbh, i see the draw in airing your grievances all in one place, but it's exhausting, and eventually your supporters grow tired of the negativity, and you grow tired of the negativity too. that's why i think it's usually better to stick to posting and sharing the stuff you love, not the stuff you hate, or at least, find a balance. though their presence is much, much smaller, creator networks for women, lgtbq, and racialized people have sprung up, and so have spaces where people post and repost art that engages with class, race, gender etc.

but it still feels like racialized people have a much quieter voice on tumblr. i have to rely on stumbling upon them naturally, which is next to impossible, especially if you're on tumblr for a small to medium sized fandom, which i think most fandoms are these days. your supermassive fandoms - doctor who, sherlock, kpop, harry potter, the mcu, also no longer dominate the site. i would still say tumblr is the big fandom site, but a lower user count means that the internet's fandom site is smaller than before.

so, less users in general, and any existing minority shrinks. and if we're talking racialized people who are lgtbq, that's an even smaller minority.

this in my opinion has contributed in a major way to the backlash against feminism, the idea that "terfs ruined feminism" with the subtle suggestion that feminism has perhaps failed, or was never really good to begin with, and a laser focus on terfs as the ones responsible as though the mainstream, patriarchal, cis-heteronormative bloc had absolutely nothing to do with it. or the ludicrous idea that terfs are the mainstream, patriarchal cis-heteronormative bloc. two things can be bad, that doesn't mean they're the same thing.

anyway! a big part of the original tumblr feminist movement was not just the "poc run blog" but in the "woc run blog". "poc" was absorbed into BIPOC, and "woc" is a legacy term. your woc were regularly venting about how being a woman of colour means choosing between your race and your gender, putting up with the misogyny of the racialized men in your life who you show up for constantly but who throw you under the bus when the white man asks them how high to jump. now there's white lgbtq bloggers all over the place asking whether you "include black and brown men when you said you say men are trash?" (yes, i absolutely am) and if you ask that question to a room full of white people, they're all going to keep their mouths shut because they don't want to appear racist.

well, white men do not have a monopoly on misogyny. misogyny levied at racialized women by racialized men is a huge intra-community barrier to trying to organize against racism and white supremacy. it is extremely upsetting to see white people suggest that racialized women, lgbtq people and children are not oppressed by the racialized men in their own communities. that we are not survivors of domestic abuse, sexual abuse or that we do not endure oppression under patriarchy in the home, workplace and in society inflicted upon us by our own kin, which compounds upon what we already absorb from white people.

and they can go on doing so on here because many racialized women have shut up and gone away. even running blogs aimed around celebrating themselves has become a service to white consumers that they've done thanklessly for years. just to hear that actually, they have no right to say "men are trash" because what if the brown man that abused them or their mom or their aunties overhears and gets his feelings hurt. didn't we discern the difference between hurt feelings and systemic oppression almost fifteen years ago on tumblr dot com?

like, sure, maybe we should adjust "women only spaces" to be "spaces for women and trans people" but we can do that and not pretend that we have absolutely no idea why women live in fear of men, or that a reasonable amount of fear is completely unwarranted.

man it is one thing to come back here to find all the, admittedly, sometimes kind of annoying sjw blogs around race gone, and another to see a resurgence of popular MRA talking points. but i see how that's happened. racialized women are done talking about this, and who can blame them. white women, and i wish i only meant cis women, get slapped with 'terf' the second they open their mouths, so they are also done talking about this.

if you managed to read all of this please be a little careful when reblogging posts that are critical of feminism. yes, there are a few bad-faith actors within feminism, but feminists in general are a minority group, even if it doesn't feel that way on tumblr. think about it, how long has it been since you saw someone with 'feminist' in bio? is it a good thing to keep facilitating this growing resentment against feminism? has feminism done nothing for us? should we toss it out with the bathwater?

[spiffyflypie]

starting to suspect that a lot of cishet people just arent attracted to each other

not only is there that thing where cishet men seem to hate everything fun and real about a cishet woman (body hair, rolls, tummy, sagging breasts, genitalia that aren't a certain way)

but ive also noticed a thing where cishet women aren't attracted to cishet men either, and treating sex as a thing they have to put up with/something that cishet men "naturally" want more than cishet women. there's the idea that cishet women think penises "look like thumbs" and find balls unattractive.

maybe you specifically just aren't that into cishet men? you don't have to tolerate mid sex with people you aren't into! you don't have to have sex with anybody at all, or you can find someone you're genuinely attracted to to have sex with!

no genitals are uglier/less worthy of attraction than any other

and whats sad is i Know there's cishet people who love each other's bodies, but the ones who don't treat it as this universal thing, and this idea has spread into larger cultural zeitgeists

when you've seen how hungry and reverent queer people can be for each other, how can you accept begrudging tolerance in your sexual relationships?

maybe being t4t has spoiled me but cishet people do you even like each other's bodies???

[thisaintascenereviews]

Various Artists – Barbie: The Album

Mentioning the phrase “pop music” seems to illicit a lot of reactions, usually within the realms of “I love it” and “I hate it.” Most people either seem to love pop music, or at the very least, certain artists within it, or they loathe it. I wanted to preface this review with my own rather complicated history with pop, because pop music is a genre that I have a rather strange “relationship” with. I got into music during the early to mid-00s, when pop music was in an interesting place, thanks to house / dubstep music being huge, and a lot of well-established artists now were just getting started, such as Lady Gaga, Kesha, The Jonas Brothers, Justin Timberlake, Bruno Mars, and many more, but pop music was starting to become boring and bland. I was also much more into emo, pop-punk, and metalcore, although I would come to realize years later, a lot of the pop-punk that I listened to was merely pop-rock with an emo lens through it. Thirteen-year-old me thought I was the bee’s knees for listening to that edgier and darker kind of music (I did like some “classic rock” at the time, too), and I thought that was “real music,” as every preteen and teenager tends to think during adolescence. I just didn’t find anything to like when it came to “mainstream” music, but that all changed in the winter of 2012.

I remember it like yesterday, because it was one of those things you won’t forget. I was in FYE, and I had just discovered the magic of that store, but I was looking around for whatever I could find. I was always looking for anything at all, and I could spend hours in music stores, but I ended up finding a copy of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Say what you will about Jackson as a person, as well as his legacy, but Thriller is one of the best albums ever made. Without going detail into it, it’s a record that I knew about without even knowing anything about pop music. It’s one of those albums that I knew I needed to hear, so I picked it up for a good price (they always had stuff on sale, too, and that really helped my decision picking it up), and I ended up falling head over heels for it. What was interesting, however, is that, despite being released in the 1980s, it changed my perception of what pop music is, let alone what it can be. Ever since then, I became a fan of pop music, and for years after, I enjoyed plenty of pop records, such as albums from Justin Timberlake, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Harry Styles’ solo material, just to name a few artists, but listening to that record opened up a whole new world for me.

Pop music, at its core, is escapism. Whether it’s from their own lives, or wanting to live through their favorite pop singers, they want to escape. The same can be said for all kinds of music, but pop music has always been “popular” for a reason. When people think of pop music, they think of catchy, accessible, and “safe” music that doesn’t push boundaries or offend anyone. When I listened to Thriller, that misconception was completely shattered. That was when I took pop music seriously, and every now and again, you can find a great pop record, but a lot of pop music is still relatively safe, tame, and bland. Not that it’s bad, but it doesn’t push any boundaries, although that’s not the point, since it’s to sell records and make money.

I’ve found myself not as interested in pop music over the years, thanks to own tastes shifting, and pop music as a whole changing. It just hasn’t appealed to me, minus a few artists, but every once in awhile, I’ll find something I like and that “something” right now is the Barbie movie soundtrack. This film, released just a few weeks ago, is the latest topic in the pop culture zeitgeist, alongside Oppenheimer, and alongside the film, a soundtrack was released that caught my curiosity by featuring some of the most popular names in pop, such as Lizzo, Khalid, the Kid Laroi, Dua Lipa, Karol G, and Billie Eilish, although one of the big songs from this record is the remix / interpolation of “Barbie Girl” by Aqua that features Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice. That’s a very stacked list of artists, let alone the whole record being produced by Mark Ronson of “Uptown Funk” fame.

Despite not listening to a lot of pop music anymore, I was curious to see how this soundtrack would pan out, especially not having seen the film yet. You can talk about this album in two ways, the first being how it holds up on its own as a soundtrack, and the second as a soundtrack after seeing the film, but because I haven’t seen the movie yet, I thought I’d first talk about it on its own, and then talk about it again once I see the movie, or write a small companion piece to along with this. Soundtracks typically are companion pieces to the movie or show they accompany, and there is often an expectation that they need to be as good, if not better, than the work they’re apart of. I won’t comment on the film, as I haven’t seen it yet, but I will say that the soundtrack works quite well on its own. The soundtrack doesn’t say anything or do anything that pushes any kind of boundary, and it does what you’d expect a Barbie soundtrack to do, which is give you an album’s worth of catchy, fun, and summery jams, and that’s okay! I’ve talked about many times how not everything needs to be deep, and this is a perfect example of that.

The Barbie soundtrack is fun, lighthearted, catchy, and enjoyable from beginning to end. A lot of the songs are quite good, if not great, and it feels like a cohesive soundtrack, instead feeling like a random soundtrack, instead feeling like a random assortment of artists. I’m curious as to how these songs work in the film, but a lot of solid tracks are here, such as “Pink” by Lizzo, “Speed Drive” by Charlie XCX, “Silver Platter” by Khalid, or the “Barbie Girl” remix I mentioned earlier. It won’t blow your mind, or ultimately change the way you think about pop music, but it’s a fun ride through the world of Barbie. There are a few standouts, such as Billie Eilish’s “What Were We Made For,” which I guarantee is going to do some numbers in the coming weeks, but there are also a few songs that don’t add anything or do anything, such as the Tame Impala song “Journey To The Real World,” which seems to have a better purpose in the movie, but it’s only a minute long, so it doesn’t really do anything or go anywhere. Haim has a song, too, entitled “Home,” and it’s a good song, but it’s nothing really that special. I enjoy listening to it, but I wouldn’t pretend it’s one of my favorites. If anything at all, listen to the soundtrack and pick out your favorites, but I don’t think anything on here is worth outright skipping, although Gayle (who’s famous for “abcdefu” from a couple of years ago) does have a weird song that interpolates “Butterfly” by Crazy Town. It’s kind of fun, but also very weird and makes no sense, especially for the Barbie movie, so I don’t know how that song fits into the overall narrative, but it’s a decent song, nonetheless.

I’m interested to see how the songs from the soundtrack fit into the film, so when I go back and listen to the soundtrack after seeing it, I can picture the songs in my head. I’m very excited to see how “I’m Just Ken” by Ryan Gosling, who plays Ken in the movie, fits into the film, because that’s one of the funniest songs here. Nonetheless, this is a soundtrack that works for what it is – a catchy and fun good time. You don’t need anything more sometimes, since not everything needs to be deep, challenging, or have an underlying message to it. Sometimes a song or album can be fun, and you can enjoy it merely on a surface level. Sometimes enjoying things at face value is all you need. Pop music is at an interesting place right now because there’s nothing happening within the genre. I mean, the top three songs in the country as of this moment are country songs, so there’s no trend or overall idea that’s getting traction, unless you look at the trends of artists interpolating songs (the “Barbie Girl” remix is a perfect example of that), or the influence of nostalgia, but pop music is at a crossroads right now, so it’ll be interesting to see how this soundtrack charts and the impact that is has, especially since the film itself is doing very well at the moment. If you’re a fan of pop music, it’s worth hearing, because it has some catchy and fun summer jams on it, even if it won’t necessarily change your life.

[gothicdicordia]

The New DnD - 3.5 vs Now.5

It's been hard for me as a long time builder of Faerun (complete worlds/modules via Electron) and a live PW DM to negotiate some of the more subtle changes a new player would never get. I started with 3.5 and being really well-versed in those rules/physics and the new stuff is so simplified.

Then in game - certain things were generic-fied - like using domains instead of Gods/Goddesses instead of both.

And of course - the general use of Drow, Tieflings, and Elemental/Aasimar as discriminated against, but not integrating that more fully into the plot for player characters origin characters. No one likes racism - but it's been a part of Faerun culture forever (Dwarves hate Elves and vice versa, everyone hates Mindflayers and Thayans (except Mindflayers and Thayans.) And to choose that race was to accept - possible racism/culturism and physical/character stat weaknesses.

(It is also important - overall - the thing that DEFINES adventuring parties is the ability to see past racism either with benevolence or seeing each diverse member as an a means to an end or asset toward their goal even if it pushes them to give up racist views of their past.)

So seeing a massive bloom of Tiefling/Drow/Aasimar ocs/tavs kinda put me off at my core. Yes, horns are cool, but wtf you are going to have the plot/culture/shift pivot around that choice. (At least you would if I wrote the game.)

Also I felt Evil Playthroughs lack a bit of bite and don't sandbox the evil character stringently enough in the environment. I mean if you are going to pick evil - let's get some evil Gods in there vs Domains. If you play a Thayan Red Wizard, you get treated like one or a Priest of Lovitar or Druid of Talona/Malar. You should walk into Rivington and people cringe in fear when they see the robes/tattoos or the religious symbols.

Same thing for neutral/good - you walk into town, people see a Chauntea Druid and know they could get healing (for free) or maybe help with sickly plants or fields. Or a Knight of Lathander or Tyr walks into town and they know they could get both help and healing. They are HAPPY to see you.

Honestly though - I don't care in the end. The popularity of the game is forcing literacy on people who usually play mindless console games. It is basically forcing non-readers and delayed readers to read to enjoy the game. It might not be the DnD I learned or am most fluid with, but it is an evolution on the Toolset I know so well and the physics I learned to develop in its baby-stages in NWN1/2.

And as long as a game is forcing/motivating young people to READ and learn, plus teaching them tabletop unwittingly, fueling fan art and writing, and even moreso fueling new modders to learn to code/program to make the game do what they like - I am VERY happy with the creative zeitgeist it is.

Nuala: "Grandpa Tam? *rolls eyes* "Now I have to argue with a mirror about who's the boss in Thay."

[pageofheartdj]

Honestly I think part of the problem with the whole narcissistic abuse thing is that npd was named after the trait of narcissism rather than being given it's own word.

Like before autism was autism, autistic, etc a word with it's own loaded definition? Was borderline a word with it's own definition? All the other personality disorders (other than schizoid personality disorder I guess) are either loosely based on other words or given new words as their name.

Other than narcissistic personality disorder. Theres the tale of narcisa (however you spell it) and what happens because of her narcissism. Narcissism is a trait given to bad guys in movies and books long before narcissistic personality disorder became known.

So like part of the problem is that narcissism already had a definition and then narcissistic personality disorder came in and "took" it to mean another thing. Narcissistic abuse refers to the first definition of narcissism before it was a diagnosable personality disorder, but that doesnt make it any less harmful to people who are diagnosed.

Since it's so entrenched in the cultural zeitgeist honestly I think the easiest way to get rid of some of the stereotypes and bad view would be just to rename narcissistic personality disorder. That would get rid of most of the issues and help make the people diagnosed without not jump to all the things they've seen or heard where people talk badly about narcissism.

Idk those are my thoughts.

What is weird is that whatever legend I am googling is always sad and unfair? The only person Narcissus hurts is himself.

In one version his twin sister dies so he goes to see his reflection and he grieves and eventually dies. That's super sad. The other more common? one is just when this one dude loved his relfection too much that he never left and eventually? turned into a flower? And the other one is when he was so pretty, everyone loved him but he never loved anyone back(hi aromantics). And for that Aphrodita decided to punish him and made him fall in love with his own reflection. And the guy didn't want to, but couldn't leave and couldn't eat or drink, and so he died. Like, in all these versions he is either hurting himself or was hurt for just minding his own business(unless there is some version where he was shitty to everyone? but greek myths are often just cruel and unfair).

I don't know, think people should know better than that and understand that a disorder has nothing to do with narcissism. But it is convenient to them, they have this enemy they can openly hate and mistreat and be praised for it.

Also I don't think changing the name will help much. 'Psychopath' is still used to negatively describe people who have antisocial personality disorder traits(being named psychopathy in the past, which also is its own word?)