therealsmokingleather - Tumblr blog

[therealsmokingleather]

[therealsmokingleather]

No. "The Man" didn't win. They stopped the war. We won.

Wild how I grew up seeing "hippies" in American media as this comical media caricature of someone dirty, gross, naive, useless, annoying, lazy and completely detached from reality, so stripped of all the original context that I must have been in my late teens when I first heard the hippie cliche is specifically a parody of an anti-war protest movement. We're never even told that our archetypical image of them is mostly just the fashion trends that young people were generally into at the time, and we think that's specifically "a hippie" just because that much of the country's youth were united against our government in the same decade. "The Man" basically won; he got away with his war and he distorted most cultural memory of its detractors into a pathetic cartoon punchline that's already outlived most of them.

[therealsmokingleather]

Good to see you Bob.

[therealsmokingleather]

i keep seeing people talk about their bfs/husbands weaponizing incompetence to avoid grocery shopping or purposefully fucking it up. mine doesn't do that he'll shop on his own prerogative like an actually functional adult, his issue is he occasionally brings home a Cursed Item

[therealsmokingleather]

But sure, "both parties are the same." And "voting is a waste of time."

The GOP wants the US to start a Nuclear War in the middle east. I think they have collectively lost their fucking minds!!!

[therealsmokingleather]

ive found that partially treated mental illness can sometimes look to uninvolved onlookers like faked mental illness.

[therealsmokingleather]

So now I'm going to say the same thing to my trans friends the same thing as I say to my friends who are having babies:

"Smoke is a perfectly good name for a boy OR a girl."

There's something really flattering about finding out someone trans picked your name

Like yes that IS a great name. You went to the farmers market, weighed all the produce, and picked mine? Taste and also excellence, go off king

[therealsmokingleather]

[therealsmokingleather]

UBI needs to happen. via antiwork

[therealsmokingleather]

My last post on this didn’t get a ton of traction so I’m trying again. The latest budget proposal for NYC includes a $58.3 million cut to public libraries.

Previous cuts forced NYC public libraries to close on Sundays, and this further round of cuts would likely force libraries to end weekend service entirely. Additionally, it would mean further cuts to programming and the indefinite delay of reopening libraries that have been closed for renovation, which would leave entire neighborhoods without a library.

There is a preliminary budget hearing on May 21, and until then libraries are asking people to sign a letter here to urge the mayor’s office and city council to reverse the cuts.

I know things are terrible in a lot of ways right now and people probably feel overwhelmed and burnt out, but signing this letter (or reblogging this post) is a small, quick, concrete way to make a difference.

[therealsmokingleather]

The dumbest people.

[therealsmokingleather]

One thing I find really fun and interesting when writing Hob Gadling (Sandman) in fic is to keep front and center that he’s the one of the only immortals I know of in fiction who is completely anti-nostalgia.

That’s not to say Hob can’t have fond memories, or keep mementos or relics of happy times.

But I don’t think we have a single canonical instance in the comic or show of Hob waxing poetic about how good things used to be. Quite the contrary, when actually asked about what the world used to be like, he says, err, colorful things like this:

And when it comes to memories of past lives and lovers, we get scenes in Hob’s Leviathan like this:

… which is actually Hob throwing away what appears to be a photograph of himself from his previous identity, alongside his previous lover (or wife), Elspeth seen earlier in the comic. Truly severing ties with that previous life. (Which is not to say he always does this, he seems to deeply regret pawning his portrait of Eleanor for food in the 1600s.)

This is unusual because most immortals in fiction have some past era that they miss. Or keep some historical affectation, like an accent, or slang, or clothes or hairstyles, which are slightly or even wildly out of date for the present day.

But Hob doesn’t. In the show even more than the comic we really get to see that he updated everything, including clothes, accent, slang, and pronunciation to blend into the latest era. There’s no sense that he misses any previous era and he enthusiastically embraces whatever new thing arrives, like his clunky mobile phone in 1989.

I just find this really fascinating because I think the knee-jerk tendency for writers when portraying an immortal is to make them a product of their time, brought forward to the present. The logical thing would be to have them prefer some time period or aspects of a past time period over another, or fail to be completely up to date on some aspect of life, just like your grandparents might not be up to date with the latest slang.

But because this is such a logical way to depict an immortal, it borders on cliche if not done thoughtfully. What sets Hob apart and makes him such an intriguing character is that he bucks this trend. He doesn’t prefer the past, he thinks every new innovation is brilliant, from chimneys to mobile phones. He doesn’t stick to old ways of speaking, he rigorously adopts the latest slang and pronunciation. He doesn’t wax nostalgic about how things were better in his day. If anything he seems to firmly leave every previous era in the past, as seen when even disposing of a picture of his past identity with his past lover as part of moving on to the next identity.

It’s just something I find worthy of keeping firmly in mind when writing him, as one of those unique little details that make him feel authentic to his character, as seen on the page and on screen, as opposed to falling to my own instincts (often lazy ones) to make him a more standard issue immortal as seen in other stories.

[therealsmokingleather]

[therealsmokingleather]

The Dead Kennedys singles collection from 1979 to 1982.

Hardly any band has produced more socially relevant songs than the Dead Kennedys

What is your top single from the band?

For me it’s definitely “Nazi Punks Fuck Off”

[therealsmokingleather]

[therealsmokingleather]

Talking Heads - David Byrne

[therealsmokingleather]