#we used to have a society a real society

[skybars]

this gamingmas has been fun so far however i think there was just a certain unhinged gayness about 2016 gamingmas that is simply impossible to recreate or outdo. she was the doer. she was camp. she was everything and more….sorry

[fromtheseventhhell]

Another round of asoiaf "prettycourse", another round of people ignoring Arya's self-esteem issues and how it relates to her arc because their enjoyment of the series hinges on an 11-year-old being considered ugly.

[add1ctedt0you]

What a plot twist you were. [x]

[tallymali]

i have such a morbid fascination with those weird reddit dudes who rate their attraction to a woman by working out the ratios and proportions of her features. i want to know if it has ever occurred to them that this is not how other people experience attraction

[metanarrates]

i already know that this happens with just about every form of abuse, because a lot of people only engage with abuse to be sensationalist in fiction, but it is really frustrating to see cults tossed around to make something more Edgy or whatever without ever understanding the extent of harm cults cause in real life. like hey, did you know that cult members are in fact victims of massive abuse on a systematic level? did you know there are quite a lot of them in real life and maybe you shouldn't invoke the specter of that abuse so casually? no? you're just gonna write about guys in black cloaks sacrificing a goat or whatever? ok.

[hushed-chorus]

Childhood abuse is real.

Resulting PTSD and C-PTSD is real.

A higher proportion of ex-foster care kids have PTSD than do war veterans but they are vastly underdiagnosed

Ex-foster kids are far more likely to end up homeless, addicted to drugs, dying young, etc. I could go on, but won't.

Childhood neglect and abuse cannot be cured with a hug

Being triggered is not a 'personal choice'

[eldritch-thrumming]

i saw that review on letterboxd of all the rhetorical questions for barbie and like… the more i think abt it, the more i’m certain that the review’s author fundamentally misunderstood the film. barbie land is not a utopia in the way that adults would think abt a utopia, like the author seems to imply… barbie land is canonically shaped by little girls playing with their dolls. that’s why we see a supreme court. thats why there are nobel prizes and authors and lawyers (also because that’s how the toys are marketed… would there be a mermaid in ur utopia??? there would be in mine!). that’s why barbie and ken don’t necessarily know what a boyfriend and girlfriend are “meant” to do (not to mention that the author’s assumption that sex is fundamental to a romantic relationship is problematic at best). that’s why barbie is indifferent to ken (i personally had the life size barbie and my sister had the barbie dream house—we had the working woman barbie game, i had the genie barbie gameboy game, we had countless barbie dolls; we didn’t own a single ken doll lol). barbie land is a world created by and for little girls as they play with their dolls (she says in a comment on the original post “don’t little girls play with their dolls in a sexual way?” and yeah, sure, some do. but i didn’t and i’m sure there are others who didn’t… just like there are some girls who completely mutilated their own dolls and made them into horrifying creatures)… that’s why stereotypical barbie starts having an existential crisis—because a grown woman begins to play with her doll again and starts reshaping barbie land… we, as the audience, are meant to understand this as an outlier to how barbie land is canonically created. the author also calls ken “crass” and “slovenly”… maybe after he builds the patriarchy in barbie land he becomes “crass” but i wouldn’t call him slovenly at any point in the film (i suppose this is just semantics tho).

also, please stop saying that barbie land is a reversal of the real world. it isn’t, even if that may have been the filmmakers intentions. again, barbie is indifferent to ken. she does not abuse him, she does not treat him like he exists to service her by cooking or cleaning or providing other favors for her… barbie does not oppress ken in the way that men oppress women in the real world (we have no idea if he owns property or where he lives and she doesn’t seem to particularly care—extremely different from the fact that women couldn’t have their own bank accounts or credit cards, get a mortgage on their own or divorce their husbands through no fault divorce until the second half of the 20th century in the us… within a lot of our mothers and grandmothers lifetimes!!!!) and it is a complete disservice to conflate or equate the two. we actually see barbie drawing clear boundaries around her time and space in regards to ken—this is not a reversal of misogyny as women and girls experience it in the real world, by any stretch of the imagination.

is the film perfect or revolutionary or radical? of course not. it was produced by major studios and corporations in hollywood. of course the barbie movie is a fucking commercial for barbie, like… to expect anything different is just extremely dumb on your part if u saw the trailer, saw the marketing, saw the interviews, bought a ticket, and sat ur ass in the theater, like be fuckin serious. but don’t do women and girls a disservice by discrediting the world and thoughts and ideas it could open up for them by seeing themselves be taken seriously on screen in a major summer blockbuster with stupid fucking questions because u want to feel superior to everyone else because YOU and ONLY YOU see through the capitalist marketing of lipstick pop girlboss feminism (especially when juxtaposed with the way the female characters are treated in oppenheimer, which we cannot help but compare to the barbie film with the viral marketing of barbenheimer).

[kuja-kujaku]

lmao I’m not even 32 yet and someone asked me when I’m going to start coloring my grey hair. never, actually, it’s a condition. it’s called Pretty Boy Disease and it’s terminal. it just gets worse as I get older, I just keep getting more and more grey hairs until I’m so hot people can’t stand to look at me. make sure it’s an open-casket funeral, don’t put me in the ground without getting a good eyeful bc I worked hard for these sultry little grey binches.

[girls-and-honey]

.

[hauntedwoman]

actually one of the things about perpetually online ppl that rly annoys me is how they blindly adopt communism as an inverse of capitalism and call themselves a "communist" (i mostly see this w gen z age ppl that live in the us) as a way to say that they hate america when they really have no idea how badly communism decimated eastern european countries and their possibilities to grow into a stable economic state

[x-ladydisdain-x]

“people are inherently selfish, government is necessary bc everyone would hurt each other without enforcement of rules” my local library has no late fee. sure, maybe some asshole who has been so deeply brainwashed by capitalism that they are convinced that ultimate success is material/monetary gain that comes at minimal cost to themself may steal a book every once in a while. this hypothetical asshole is not a representative of human nature, but a product of the society they live in. This asshole would not exist in an anarchist society. And then there’s the majority of the people who visit the library and know that stealing from a public library is an awful thing to do because libraries are sacred spaces and provide crucial resources. the majority of us who are not so far gone as to never even consider the community and to prioritize self gain above all else are who should be used as a more accurate representation of humanity. And sure maybe there’s another person who knows that stealing from libraries is bad and wouldn’t so in most circumstances, but maybe for whatever they really really desperately need a book permanently and can’t obtain it through other means, and so they steal. Because this is not to say that people aren’t inherently selfish, this person is a perfectly valid representation of human nature as well. It’s just that humans are also inherently communal and compassionate. We just live in a society where selfishness and individualistic drive is encouraged, praised, and necessary, while collectivity and striving for the common good is frowned upon and a burden, and efforts rarely have lasting tangible results. So with the question of the necessity of government or the potential for any economic system beyond capitalism, it is easy to say that nothing else would work due to the inherent selfishness of humans when that is what we have been taught and what we observe. And in situations of suddenly entering periods of anarchy, of course there was violence and theft. Of course after generations of viewing the accumulation of wealth and material goods as the ultimate goal, and being met with the shock of it all being within reach with no more regulation of what you can or can’t have, the people failed at self regulation and acted brashly. These instances can’t serve as examples of life under anarchy because they happened suddenly, under already strenuous and desperate circumstances. Such a system, or lack thereof, would have to be implemented gently, changing peoples mindsets alongside it.

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

one thing i'm really really fascinated by is the fact that everyone in the modern pokemon world seems to consider the deities a power source, nothing more. the games generally imply that knowledge of the legendaries has been lost to time and legend and only preserved by a select few who keep to the Ancient Ways but i don't really think that sounds likely. i think they might be common knowledge people just don't seem to. conceptualize them as greater than in the way that we generally think of them. "this is a divine force that underpins reality and has been worshipped since antiquity" is not a thing that seems to have any problem coexisting with "i'm going to put this thing in an engine and make it my tool." and it's very frequently the baddies doing this which maybe weakens the point a little but very rarely is the point of contention with the bad guys "hey you shouldn't do that to god" that's kind of like, never the part of their thing that people object to. it's always their motives, never their methods. when the Good Guy (local ten year old) catches god and makes it their new partner, nobody has a problem with it! and people joke about this but i'm saying it might imply a way deeper facet of society than people give it credit for.

and is this maybe trying to force the round peg of pokemon legendaries into the square hole of actual religion. very possibly! the games aside from pla certainly seem only very occasionally interested in treating these creatures as gods or godlike or worshipped in any way, and far more often just want to treat them as regular pokemon But Stronger. so it's maybe not reasonable to try and say these entities are deities. but the problem is they are! it's not like this isn't supported textually, it's just... not a part of canon that canon is actually interested in. dialga, palkia, the lake trio, kyogre, groudon—these things are gods. canon can mince words and call them legendaries and "worshipped as deities maybe sometimes" but when you get to the point where you're discussing something that represents a fundamental force governing reality and/or can end the world on a whim then idc what you call it. that's a god.

but the problem is that they are gods and also pokemon, they're both simultaneously. and people in the pokemon world seem to have worked this out, and have had the collective realization that the gods are truly not exempt from their own rules. they can be captured, they can be subjugated, they can be used. this also ties back in with the whole anarchism discussion obviously but it's just the fact that like. it goes way deeper than everyone being fine with the ten year old putting the lord of time in a ball. the entire world operates on the premise of "eat your gods."

does that like... contradict worship? can you be faithful to something knowing it's been used as a tool?

[dinitride-art]

Mike and Will both would’ve died in season one if someone didn’t save them. They both have dramatic near death experiences that are set apart from everyone else. Will needed cpr when they found him in the library, and Mike actually jumped off a cliff. Those two situations both went far enough that it would have been too late for them to save themselves. And that’s why either of them dying at the end of the story doesn’t make sense. They’ve already almost died. They were already too far over the precipice to turn back by themselves.

Maybe a conclusion to this could be the two of them learning how to live by themselves. In the monologue Mike says that, “[he] doesn’t know how to live without [El].” And while Mike’s just saying whatever he can in that moment, what if there’s truth in that statement? What if he doesn’t know how to protect himself. How to not jump off a cliff and be caught? And Will’s hated accepting help for a while now. But always has to rely on people to save him in the end. Maybe Will’s going to figure out how to protect the people around him- without putting himself in harms way.

Maybe the conclusion to this story is learning how to save yourself. To love yourself as much as everyone else does so you can protect them too. Strength doesn’t come from self sacrifice. Not in this story. Barb, Bob, Eddie- they didn’t run away. They didn’t make sure they themselves were safe. And all their deaths have caused has been pain. Being the hero gets you killed. But trying to live? Will reaching out for his mom when he’s stuck in the Upside Down? She came to find him. Whether they believed her or not. Will was alive, and she went to save him. And when El was on her own in the woods, Hopper put eggos in a box. He took her in, and kept her safe. From everyone- maybe a little too much at times- but he went to her. And he protected her.

But Nancy’s right. “They aren’t little kids anymore.” They’re not going to have someone to protect them all the time. They’re going to have to be strong enough to protect themselves. Strong enough to live. Not sacrifice themselves to save everyone else.

[rahabs]

It's just amazing to me that all the people who were having complete meltdowns in February over a video game are now on this website spitting some of the most vile, heinous, antisemitic rhetoric, is all.

[kittoforos]

a lot of Posts floating around now about chatgpt in college, lxds. some things people are saying are true of course, but I work in at a large public university in the usa and I will set aside my cool laissez faire tech accelerationist cynicism to be totally honest for a moment:

the argument that ‘essay writing is a super specific skill that doesn’t matter in professional life so you should disregard those courses and just cheat to get the degree’ is very concerning to me, even as someone who doesn’t give a fuck about cheating per se, bc we don’t teach ‘essay writing’ in reading comprehension courses. or at least decent instructors don’t. I don’t. all that stuff about it being a cultural code is like, true above basic courses (so like, in grad school and even advanced undergrad courses yes it’s about *how* you write with all the attendant bullshit) but in that kind of remedial textual reasoning class in undergrad that’s required to get the basic ba degree, *nobody* writes in the prestige cultural style. the task in question is to be able to parse text and understand and construct logical arguments, and to be able to tell when an argument has something wrong with it, and to explain this clearly to other people. which you will need all the time forever in this hashtag society no matter what your job is, so you can tell when institutions are taking you for a ride. so like. …. :/

[string-cheese-cake]

Nobody asked but white supremacy is the reason why white women are obsessed with true crime.

So when chattel slavery was becoming cemented in the United States and other European areas, the idea of biological race and racial hierarchy emerged to justify the generational enslavement of Africans and the genocide of indigenous people. Africans and other non-whites were labeled as less developed, more susceptible to their "primal urges" and committing sex crimes and therefore needed to be controlled by white men. Specifically to protect white women.

White supremacy is typically framed as necessary to 'protect' (read: control) white women, the mothers of the next generation of whites. They must be protected from "sexually voracious black men" (read: miscegenation and mixed race children). So white supremacy operates on the myth that white women are constantly under threat of sexual violence and must be protected by white men.

That myth becomes baked into the public consciousness, many unaware of the origin or even that the idea is there. It even becomes less racially based, but there is still a common belief that white women are inherently vulnerable to violent crime. Especially among white women. To be fair, it's difficult to not internalize an idea that you are not exactly aware of but is still seeped in every interaction and bit of advice. Don't wander off, don't talk to strangers, don't go out alone or late at night, cover your body, hold your keys between your fingers, take self defense, watch your drink, don't be under the influence. Your body is soft and valuable and delicate and you must protect it.

This idea of vulnerability is reinforced in the news media, which chooses to focus on stories which fit this particular narrative of white women's vulnerability. Missing white women syndrome. This subconscious belief has saturated society. White women develop an outsized fear of death by violent crime. So what do they do? They embrace it. They eat up stories of families like theirs and the deaths of women like them.

It's been suggested that experiencing that fear of violence in the controlled environment true crime provides can be cathartic, somewhat like watching a horror film. There is also a sense of justice and closure felt when the perpetrator of that crime is punished.

In conclusion; White women love true crime because it's a coping mechanism for their deeply embedded fear of violence which was established and is upheld by white supremacy.