treefey

[treefey]

I'm watching Friends for the first time (I know, 30 years after it started airing) and here are some things I've noticed:

-They're so touchy feely! Non romantic shoulder touches, back rubs, and squishing together in an armchair, Geller sibling closeness. Was this normal of people in their 20s in the 90s? If so, no wonder everyone is so touch starved now!

-Rachel and Monica have "headlights" all the time. I wonder when we decided as a society that we should have the shape of boobs but no nipples (and therefore more padding in bras)? It doesn't do anything for me, but at the same time it's nice to just have that be a neutral part of them having bodies

-Similarly, I've noticed in some close ups Phoebe has some fine lines. It's nice. I'm pro-aging/people having normal faces on our screens

-I grew up without Internet and cell phones, and yet I'm still like "can't you just text them?" So it really shows how much having a smartphone has completely rewritten my brain

-Not sure why, but I was completely thrown off guard the first time I noticed the towers in the background. I think because people my age and younger are always talking about the show and obsessed with it that it didn't really occur to me that it would cover the transition from a pre-post 9/11 world. I mostly glaze over when people talk about how that messed us up to watch people die on TV-I think the wars and politics since have kind of overshadowed the emotional impact of 9/11. Husband says they address it, not there yet or looking forward to it. Watching these earlier seasons is almost like looking at an AU of our world, one where there was hope

-I know there's a lot of the show that's outdated and the bad stuff like stealing from Single Living. But I am surprised at how well a lot of the humor holds up to me. One liners aren't as sharp as like Arrested Development, but I still crack a smile

-As far as character writing goes, I'm most disappointed in Joey's character so far. Like, he has a million sisters and is from a large Catholic family; they should have leaned into him being decent with babies, good at cooking, and generally used to girly stuff being around. He often has emotional intelligence when others don't, and he could even be such a ladies man bc he's so used to talking to women. It was all right there, but instead you have the ep where he has the hot roommate and Chandler is telling him he's doing unmanly things by doing crafts. Joey listens to Chandler and freaks out when it would be cooler if he were just unfazed.

[treefey]

I want to just go outside and scream all day like a cicada

[treefey]

medieval knight raising the visor on his helm just so you can see him rolling his eyes

[treefey]

I'm scared to post this because politics, but also think that ASOUE is intensely, purposefully political and overlooking that waters down the themes. So here it goes. I recently reread ASOUE, and can articulate more about how what OP said struck me.

"now it’s just a symbol for people to continue fighting each other "

"nothing is as important as the lives lost in the fight over it... people fight, and refuse to stop, believing they are right above all else"

ASOUE is great because it often works on multiple levels, most of which went over my head as a kid. Daniel Handler is (culturally) Jewish, and ASOUE has explicit Jewish themes and ideas. ASOUE is also far from apolitical. Sunny literally has a dig against Bush & Cheney and one against Justice Scalia. I cannot emphasize enough how sneaking anti-Bush stuff into a children's book in the post-9/11 haze was boldly political.

With this context, the schism being at least in some part a reference to Israel/Palestine is in line with the themes of the books.

To me, the quotes I pulled from OP capture the absolute helplessness of the situation as a random person. The current war is the latest iteration of this real life schism, and it probably won't be the last. Meanwhile, thousands of lives are lost (including children who never get a chance to live!!). Those lives unlived can never be replaced.

IRL the war is more complicated than this little imperfect allegory. Intellectually, we all have opinions. However, emotionally, I know people are being destroyed as collateral damage in something that started before they were born, and the destruction will continue until there's no one left to decide who was really "right."

Unrelated to anything, but I think what was in the Sugar Bowl ultimately doesn’t matter. Maybe it mattered once, but now it’s just a symbol for people to continue fighting each other. What was in the Sugar Bowl isn’t important, what’s important is the never ending war that happened over it. By not telling the readers what is in the Sugar Bowl, the entire point of the story becomes clear, it never mattered, because nothing is as important as the lives lost in the fight over it. The point is to show how people fight, and refuse to stop, believing they are right above all else, both sides of the Schism are guilty of this.

[treefey]

Idk if this is an unpopular opinion, but I hope they are able to save the facade/parts of Nottaway Plantation and leave it scorched. I think it could be really powerful if they turned the grounds into a museum and memorial, visibly beautiful and tragic (whereas before, the beauty hid the tragedy and horror and allowed people to overlook it)

Piano could be restored and only used to play Nearer my God to Thee and other songs associated with sorrow and memorializing

[treefey]

This website has a list of cities by latitude that you can search if you're not sure; alternatively, google "[place] latitude."

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

[treefey]

Idk that this will make sense to literally anyone else, but whoever is responsible for the near-perfect film that is Sneakers (1992) should be in charge of a Six of Crows miniseries

[treefey]

I just want to be "buy the giant rocks" rich (or travel to where the big rocks are okay coming home with me rich)

Why are the wealthy getting imploded in the ocean and buying governments when they could be looking at giant rocks

[treefey]

This is probably an unpopular take. But being part of a community means doing inconvenient things sometimes.

We're having our second flood in three months. The algorithm decided today to tell me that one of our parks asked for volunteers to help do a cleanup after the first flood in February, and someone complained that the city robs us so they should do their job and do the cleanup.

Second, our sewer company sent out a "if you can, please avoid running your dishwasher or washing machine to help us out" message-- we have combined sewers, and by the time it stops raining in a few days it will basically be a 4 day rainstorm. Someone commented that it was crazy they would ask us to do that since our bills are expensive.

This goes to show how separated we are from our natural environment. Sewer systems bury our streams so people have no idea how much water is running all over the place all the time. People have no idea that the concrete and asphalt they're living on here is a wetland. Or if they do, they think it's "fixed" with engineering rather than realizing every inch of concrete will happily return to being a wetland with ease. Also! we're on top of limestone, famously porous as swiss cheese. Sinkholes are not an impossibility.

We are also completely separated from how city infrastructure works. IDK if it's common knowledge that we have a combined sewer or that it only takes about 2 inches of rain to overwhelm it. We recently had some v expensive updates that made the pipes bigger, so 2" may be an old stat, but pipes are still not big enough to handle a 100+ year storm event and everyone putting large amounts of water in it at the same time. We are used to not thinking about anything that goes down the drain. And on the parks side, of course Parks employees are cleaning up. But they are a small team of humans with hundreds of acres to maintain. So they're not out of line to host a trash cleanup after a natural disaster.

Two things can be true at once. You can pay too much for bills and a community organization can ask for the community to participate in the community. Just because we pay for a service doesn't mean the organization is never allowed to ask for help. Especially when we're talking about dealing with the environment during and after a natural disaster. Especially when that help is to procrastinate on your laundry if you can?

The amount of money we pay on our taxes/bills does not control the weather. It doesn't make us not downstream from several larger cities all sending us their runoff. Our money does go to upkeep and renos, but they can only make pipes so big (see limestone point). The one exception would be if multimillionaires and over donated huge chunks of money specifically earmarked to separate our sewer and turn the city into a solarpunk dream (or maybe if they were taxed and we got a federal grant to do the same city redesign, but that's not gonna happen). Point being, the enemy is not the org asking for us to not add water to the floods.

This goes to the disconnect from the environment point, but we are not able to avoid natural disasters. They are becoming more frequent, and will continue to occur more frequently. And people are getting more isolated and selfish and reliant on consumerism to solve problems. I'm hoping it's a vocal few on socials, but it feels overwhelming. Obvs no one person can care about everything, but we should care/understand enough that when we're asked to be intentional about our water usage our response isn't to point to a ledger

[treefey]

I wonder how many kids in larger cities picked up on what VFD stood for way before it was revealed in the books

Meanwhile, me living in a smaller city incorporated in an urban sprawl metro area, never saw the FD abbreviation until I went to NYC on a school trip

[treefey]

i’m thinking a lot about - him - gawaine - lately. i mean hes always on the brain. but i’m thinking a lot about how you put your blood sweat and tears into proving you’re the best knight.. you earned the title of heir to the throne. you bleed for camelot, for lance, for arthur, for honour, for righteousness. you have a cruel streak that rears its ugly head when you fight. your insatiable need for violence haunts you, but you’re trying. you’re truly trying to be good, and kind, and selfless…and then one day your closest comrade, a person you trusted more than anyone else in the world kills your baby brothers. and everything falls. every bit of work you did to be gentle and tender and loving and selfless goes out of the window because your baby brothers are dead. your whole world has crashed down on you. you’ve tried for so long to see the good in people and the one person you loved so deeply, the one person you wanted to be good for, kills your siblings and everything you built together comes crashing down. how do you come back from that? how do you ever live with yourself again? with the knowledge that you tried so hard to reach perfection and none of it was ever worth it?

[treefey]

Rereading Fire for the 800th time in year of our lord 2025 where the first chunk of the book describes a codependent relationship between the ruler and his infinitely powerful right hand and how that unraveled the country and basically set them on the course for a giant, three-way war sure feels different

[treefey]

I'm aware irl War of the Rohirrim doesn't shy away from gore because we can stomach more from animation and you can get away with more before you have to up the age rating. But since LOTR is canonically told from Frodo and Sam's POV and they were just kinda Over It (violence), I like the idea that LOTR glosses over the gross details because it's told by little shirelings who value nothing more than all that is green and good vs WOTR told by Eowyn who 1. was raised to value war and glory and 2. still sees blood and guts every day and is unfazed by it

The distress of war and healing after it is a huge theme of LOTR and is captured especially well in Frodo and Eowyn's stories. How you live on, or how nothing can give you solace. Something Tolkien would have known a lot about. So it's more fun and more meaningful to believe there is an in-universe reason for the difference in storytelling

[treefey]

Me: Eep, I gotta work really hard to write this thesis if I'm ever going to graduate and have fun working in this field

Brain: Two greenspaces, both alike in dignity

Me: Wait, what? Where did that come from?

Brain: What if instead of working on your giant project, you rewrote the prologue to Romeo and Juliet to the theme of your paper?

Two hours later: I have four cheesy lines in something resembling iambic pentameter in ABAB rhyming scheme on what's supposed to be a scientific analysis

[treefey]

The first paragraph! I was so stressed out for like an entire third of the movie!

I feel like I've been dragged through the mud, salt and lemon juice poured in all the little cuts. My feelings are hurt

[treefey]

So, I know men are allowed to age and whatnot, but I still cannot explain how deeply reassuring it felt to see Matt actually looking 10 years older in the Daredevil born again trailer

Like, look at those lines :) He cute, so forehead lines = cute and we have permission to not look perpetually 23

[treefey]

#oops crying over a tree <3 This is also a symbol of how much we as humans know we are a part of nature, are often helpers in nature, and have the potential to be a net positive

there's a cherry blossom tree in DC that keeps blooming every year even though it shouldn't and the park service keeps thinking it's dead and then it keeps blooming! well they're removing a lot of trees to rehabilitate the area and they've said it's finally time for stumpy to go and they're going to mulch it and use the mulch to enrich all the other trees so it can help everything else keep going. and they're also going to plant spliced little pieces of it all over so that stumpy can live forever and this is genuinely sending me into a spiral