Ta-dah! I gave myself a birthday gift: Coloring the sketch of Jiang Cheng that I did for his birthday! I had a wonderful time, what an excellent gift \o/
Yue Qingyuan/Yue Qi (The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System)
Remaining time: 5 days 13 hours
PROPAGANDA:
[Gambit]
"Beautiful con-man, has done bad things he is trying to atone to, can turn anything into bombs and chose playing cards then became a gambler to stay on theme, I personally want to see him pregnant."
[Yue Qingyuan]
"The Sect Leader should get pregnant because the Sect Leader should be the picture of fertility and virility both, boost the usage of male child-bearing pills, and because the whole Sect would go crazy trying to find out who's the baby daddy. I think Yue Qingyuan could benefit from having to raise a child of his own instead of managing disciples, because Yue Qingyuan no longer has a family of his own and deserves one, and this way, perhaps he'd be forced to care about another person again. His strong and qi-rich body would also have an easy pregnancy and have a strong and happy child."
"Do you ever wonder if Grace's bike is still there at Grover Cleveland Middle School? Is it treated like a memorial for him after the annoucment of him volunteering to board the Hail Mary? Do you think his students visit it?"
alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.
we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)
please rb for larger sample size!
Question 1/3
What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?
Saving this post to show my boss who I told the AI flier makes us look lazy and ignorant, and offered to hand draw one. She still printed tons of ai fliers and I'm tempted to make a better one just because it annoys me so much.
One of the strangest things about modern culture-war discourse around film is how often movies from the past are treated as “proof” that art
One of the strangest things about modern culture-war discourse around film is how often movies from the past are treated as “proof” that art used to be apolitical, non-woke, or free from progressive messaging and few examples illustrate this better than Alien (1979).
Today, Alien is frequently praised in anti-woke circles as the kind of movie Hollywood “can’t make anymore”: tough, grounded, unpretentious science fiction without modern identity politics. Ripley is often held up as the “right way” to write a female character, supposedly unlike contemporary heroines accused of being “forced feminism.”
But this reading becomes deeply ironic once you look at what the actual creators of Alien said about the movie because the themes many modern viewers would immediately label “woke” were not accidental interpretations imposed decades later by academics or online commentators. They were intentional. Explicitly intentional. Confirmed by the filmmakers themselves.
Dan O’Bannon (the writer) openly described Alien as an attempt to “attack men sexually.” The facehugger and chestburster cycle were deliberately designed around male fears of rape, penetration, forced impregnation, and bodily violation.
Imagine that exact pitch appearing online today before release.
“New sci-fi horror movie intentionally explores male rape anxiety and reverses traditional gendered horror vulnerability.”
The reaction from much of the anti-woke internet would be immediate and predictable. You would see endless YouTube thumbnails accusing the film of “emasculating men,” “injecting gender politics into horror,” or “turning masculinity into a victimhood metaphor.” Entire outrage cycles would form around interviews where O’Bannon explained the sexual politics behind the creature design.
And that’s only the beginning.
Alien also intentionally subverted gender conventions in horror. The crew was famously written as gender-neutral, and Ripley emerged as the survivor not because the script was designed around a male power fantasy, but because the filmmakers deliberately avoided conventional gender assumptions. Ripley is competent, authoritative, emotionally controlled, and ultimately proven right while many of the male crew members panic, ignore procedure, or become victims.
More importantly, O’Bannon’s stated goal was partly to force male audiences into a position of vulnerability that horror cinema had historically imposed on women. In other words, the film intentionally reversed traditional gendered dynamics of fear and violation.
Again, imagine these interviews surfacing before a modern release.
“The filmmakers wanted men to experience vulnerability usually associated with women in horror films.”
There is almost no chance today’s anti-woke discourse would interpret that charitably. The movie would almost certainly be accused of pushing feminist ideology. Ripley would be called a “girlboss.” Think pieces and reaction videos would insist the movie was “lecturing men” or “deconstructing masculinity.”
And then there’s the corporate theme.
Alien is profoundly anti-corporate. The Nostromo crew are not glamorous explorers or military heroes, they are essentially exploited industrial workers hauling cargo for a massive corporation that views them as disposable.
Weyland-Yutani knowingly sacrifices human lives for profit and technological gain. The revelation that the crew is “expendable” is not hidden subtext, it is the moral center of the film.
The company values acquisition over human life. The android serves corporate interests over ethical ones. Workers are lied to, manipulated, and sacrificed by distant executives.
If Alien were released today, with Ridley Scott openly discussing labor exploitation and corporate dehumanization in interviews, many of the same commentators who currently celebrate the film would likely denounce it as anti-capitalist propaganda.
And that is the contradiction at the center of so much “anti-woke” nostalgia.
Many beloved older films were deeply political, deeply ideological, and often radically subversive for their time.
What protected them from being dismissed as “woke” was not the absence of progressive themes, but the absence of a modern outrage ecosystem built around scanning media for ideological infractions before audiences even see the work.
Alien succeeded because audiences encountered it first as a brilliantly made film.
The themes were embedded in atmosphere, imagery, character dynamics, and horror rather than flattened into online discourse before release. Viewers experienced the movie emotionally before they experienced it politically.
But if the same movie appeared today, same script, same themes, same creator interviews, there is every reason to believe large parts of the internet would denounce it as feminist, anti-male, sexually political, and anti-capitalist long before opening night.
The irony is that one of the movies now treated as evidence that Hollywood “used to avoid politics” was, from its inception, explicitly built around gender anxiety, sexual politics, bodily violation, and corporate exploitation, and the people who made it even said so themselves.
turnnoffyourmind
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