fandomsandhappiness

pies are nice but also manta rays

[steven-grant-gift-shoppist]

Younger Tony Jaa

Gd, I used to have a huge crush on him when I was younger, watching so many of his movies, especially his Ong-Bak ones.

[fuforthought]

Ong Bak (2003)

[parkchanwoohoo]

[bwarkz]

congrats to avalanche software for making the first game in the ‘transphobia’ genre!!

[sexybritishllama]

just finished this month's book club book, went skimming goodreads reviews afterwards as you do, got my breath taken away by this absolutely brutal ending to one of the multi-paragraph 1 star reviews

[sexybritishllama]

for those asking the book was the starving saints by caitlin starling

[fandomsandhappiness]

[lakemojave]

The tumpet 🎺

[lakemojave]

It's Tumpet Tuesday. Bwaaa.

[an-ruraiocht]

willie of winsbury is a very funny song

imagine you think you're gonna get executed so you make sure to dress up real nice and hope the king's latent homosexuality works in your favour and then it does

[janusfnc14]

Gonna look that up~

[an-ruraiocht]

janet: *gets pregnant*

her father, the king: who did this. please tell me it was a nobleman

janet: no it was willie of winsbury

her father, the king:

it's possible willie of winsbury always dresses in red silk but i like to think he dressed up specifically for his arrest in order to boost his chances of surviving through means of being hot

it also doesn't specify what was made of red silk so, you know, feel free to interpret this in as slutty a way as you like

[turing-tested]

Sorry am on lsd. Shouldn't have told you 2 eat a sandwich. That is your decision not mine. Sorry

this ask is so awesome. my favorite part is I can't find the other ask they're apologizing for.

[makefile-dot-in]

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

christopher nolan great gatsby where jay sits down by the pool before he’s shot and says “our roaring twenties are collapsing”

[elizabitchtaylor-deactivated202]

I learned about the murder of Kitty Genovese in two separate psychology classes, at two separate universities. It was studied as an example of the “bystander effect”, which is a phenomenon that occurs when witnesses do not offer help to a victim when there are other people present.

I was told by my professors that Kitty Genovese was a 28-year-old unmarried woman who was attacked, raped, and brutally murdered on her way home from her shift as manager of a bar. I was told that numerous people witnessed the attack and her cries for help but didn’t do anything because they “assumed someone else would”. Nobody intervened until it was too late. 

What I was not told was that Kitty Genovese was a lesbian who lived more or less openly with her partner in the Upper West Side and managed a gay bar. 

Now… is it likely that people overheard Kitty’s cries for help and ignored them because they thought someone else would deal with it? Or, perhaps, did they ignore her because they knew she was a lesbian and just didn’t care?

Maybe that’s not the case. Maybe it was just a random attack. Maybe her neighbours didn’t know she was gay, or didn’t care.

But it’s a huge chunk of information to leave out about her in a supposedly scientific study of events, since her sexuality made her much more vulnerable to violent crimes than the average person. And it’s a dishonour to her memory.

RIP Kitty Genovese. Society may only remember you for how you died, but I will remember you for who who were.

[chemicalheart-deactivated202009]

this was one of the first lessons I had in psych too and we were never told about this either nor was it in any of the reading materials

[thelingerieaddict-deactivated20]

I never knew this.

[dsudis]

I also never knew this about Kitty Genovese, but I do know that, in fact, many of the dozen (not thirty-eight) people who witnessed some part of the attack (which took place after 3AM, on a chilly night in March when most people’s windows were closed) tried to help in some way.

One shouted out his window for the attacker to leave her alone, which did successfully scare the man off temporarily.

Another called the police but, seeing her still on her feet, said only that there had been a fight but the woman seemed to be okay.

And when Kitty Genovese was finally attacked in a vestibule where she couldn’t be seen from outside, Karl Ross, a neighbor, saw what was happening but was too frightened himself to go to her rescue–so he started calling other neighbors to ask what he should do. Eventually one of them told him to call the police, which he did, and the woman he called, Sophie Farrar, rushed out to help Kitty even though she didn’t know whether the attacker was gone.

Kitty Genovese died in the arms of a neighbor who tired to help and comfort her while they waited for the police and ambulance to arrive. Kitty was in fact still alive, although mortally wounded, when the ambulance reached the scene.

The man who saw the final stabbing? Who panicked and called other neighbors first instead of the police? The man who said, infamously, that he “didn’t want to get involved” because he was reluctant to turn to the police for help? He was thought to be gay himself. He was a friend of Kitty and Mary Ann’s. After being interviewed by the police he took a bottle of vodka to Mary Ann and sat with her, trying to comfort her.

So, no. I don’t think the evidence indicates that Kitty Genovese’s neighbors let her die because she was a lesbian, because Kitty Genovese’s neighbors tried to help.

See also: Debunking the Myth of Kitty Genovese (The New York Post)

A Call for Help (The New Yorker)

(Also, going by the content of the murderer’s confession, it was indeed a random attack.)

[talesofthestarshipregeneration]

how on EARTH was this “scientifically” studied but the details gotten so wrong and the wrong as hell conclusion published and taught in schools?!?!?! where were those scientists observation skills?! on vacation?!

[deadcatwithaflamethrower]

How to take facts and turn them into an urban legend that gets taught in schools: Make a bad made-for-t.v.-movie about it, watch it, believe everything the movie says, annnnnnnd go!  That’s how it gets taught as this supposed “scientific study.”  Someone got fucking lazy.

Spread the real deal, kids.

[tehriz]

A book about this, “No One Helped”: Kitty Genovese, New York City, and the Myth of Urban Apathy, won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Nonfiction this year! if anyone wants to check it out try your local library!

[racefortheironthrone]

I want to add one crucial but telling detail: the story about the 38 witnesses didn’t come out of nowhere, it was handed to the New York Times City Editor by the Police Commissioner in order to distract said editor from asking unwelcome questions about a different case, and the story that was eventually written and which made headlines was almost entirely composed from police sources. 

At the time, the NYPD was coming under quite a bit of criticism about rising crime rates and the seeming ineffectiveness of the police’s response to the problem. In the Kitty Genovese case, even though people did in fact call the police, it took about an hour for them to show up and the first detectives didn’t arrive until three hours later (at which point they mostly spent their time interrogating Kitty’s girlfriend about their relationship, because for “some reason” they considered her to be the most likely suspect for the murder. In fact, the police wouldn’t catch the actual killer until six days later when he was picked up for having a stolen TV in the trunk of his car, at which point he admitted to having committed a total of three murders). It’s not an accident that one of the things to come out of the Genovese case was the establishment of the 9-1-1 system, because at the time that the attack happened, you had to call the specific number of a particular police precinct and it was up to the duty sergeant on the desk to take action - which was usually to send someone out from the precinct to the address reported, because cops on foot patrol wouldn’t be outfitted with two-way radios for several years. It’s more than a little convenient that at a time when the NYPD is coming in for public scrutiny about its ability to do the basic job of responding to reports of crimes in a timely fashion, the Police Commissioner happens to hand the City Editor of the city’s most prominent newspaper a story which puts the blame for the slow response on the apathy and inaction of New Yorkers, neatly absolving the NYPD for its ridiculously poor performance in this case in particular and its response to the rise in crime in general. 

It’s also quite telling that the New York Times ran with the story the way they did. It’s not like there weren’t people on the scene who said they had called the police, or that the basic facts about how many witnesses there were and what they had seen didn’t match the account that the commissioner had given. The writer the Times sent out chose not to include this information because “it would have ruined the story.“ The Times wanted to frame the story as a narrative about how the root of NYC’s problems was urban apathy and anomie - and the news organizations that picked up on the Times’ reporting and made the Kitty Genovese case a national and global story wanted to frame the story as proof that NYC was a dangerous urban jungle that deserved its decline because of the bad character of its residents.  I think the takeaway from this case isn’t just about sloppy scientific research, it’s that you have to always consider how official narratives are used to assign blame to specific individuals and groups and absolve larger institutions of responsibility. 

[sighinastorm]

Shocking: people in the past had their own motives for lying too.

[sleepyquietgirl]

I feel like I am taking crazy pills

[hyperions-fate]

Public infrastructure projects should only be funded if they involve the destruction of at least one Harry Potter locale.

[nepenthean-sleep]

straight white people making a romance movie: haha what if it was illegal to have sex? wait what's lawrence v texas. wait what's mclaughlin v florida. wait what's loving v virginia

[ninewheels]

As preposterous and stupid as this fucking movie's premise sounded (for a light-hearted rom-com, and not The Handmaid's Tale) I didn't want to think about it too much until the movie actually came out, and then I could see if it was somehow more intelligent and subversive than the trailer let on, but guess what, it's even worse!

One Night Only review: Pull out from this sex-negative rom-com

If this is what it takes to get a rom-com greenlit these days, maybe we should just let them die.

Sex workers are thrown under the bus, shown only as thieves who fleece men in the woods at night, while queer sexuality is relegated to a few scenes with Allie’s roommate (a woefully underused Quintessa Swindell) and a handful of pans past blurry same-sex extras making out in the background. “This night is for the straights,” Swindell’s character says to Allie, before saying that queer people have worked around straight laws for centuries.  This is supposed to be a nod to queer resilience, but largely comes off as straightwashing the history of anti-LGBTQ legislation in this country that led towards raids of queer clubs and incarceration of queer people in the not-too-distant past (let alone the current barrage of anti-Trans and LGBTQ legislation currently in the works and on the books). It’s also ignorant of the long and fraught fight for the normalization of age-of-consent laws, which, by the way, did not happen in all states in this very country until 2003. Yes, that’s not even thirty years ago.  By the end, our intrepid protagonists have not had sex with anyone, because this is a film about Romance with a Capital R (and I guess sex is not part of romance!) and for that very same reason they ultimately embrace the fascist state of things. They aren’t the only ones who refuse to fight back. No one in this cursed film is protesting this mandate beyond “repeal” signs in various windows and some creative graffiti (...) (...) If we are supposed to believe that the film is making some subversive statement about the state of sex and bodily autonomy in this country, it cannot end with its leads embracing their chains. That’s just warmed-over conservatism running around in sheep’s clothing.

[nepenthean-sleep]

yeah i wrote this post having only seen the trailer, but jesus christ. was this movie a psyop LMAO??

also, for the unaware: mclaughlin v. florida was a 1964 supreme court case that struck down a florida anti-miscegenation law that criminalized cohabitation (and thus, as implied, sex) between white people and people of color of opposite genders. anti-miscegenation laws made marriage and sexual relationships between white people and people of color, most often specifically black people, a FELONY in several states in the united states up until the 1950s and 1960s. though it was already struck down by the supreme court, the state of alabama didn't repeal their law until 2000! there were THREE ATTEMPTS at codifying anti-miscegenation into the us constitution!

like yes, the issue here is partially straight white people's ignorance on the united states's history of homophobic policy, but it's also really important to recognize that arguably the majority of the issue here is straight white people's ignorance of the united states's history of codifying eugenics and antiblack racism.

the premise could have been interesting as a serious dystopian story, especially taking that history into account, but it wasn't written that way at all. this movie should never have been a fucking romcom making light of the violence the united states (and many other countries) has enacted on any kinds of sexual relationships it deems undesirable.

[nepenthean-sleep]

can y’all maybe reblog this version i feel like people are forgetting about the racism and just focusing on the homophobia

[nonbinaryjudean]

like im not pro-censorship but i think if the internet archive is going to host holocaust denial and antisemitic propaganda they should at least put a warning with resources on it

[nonbinaryjudean]

I need y’all to realize that it’s on there because of their anti censorship policies, not because they’re unable to to monitor. It comes up at the top of the page when you search “Jews”. You don’t have to look hard for it.

This was literally the 8th result:

this was the 13th result:

you only have to scroll to page 3 to get this:

this justin chatter guy has uploaded tons of unabashed holocaust denial and neonazi propaganda.

i should not have to say this but this is obviously dangerous and hateful content that could lead to radicalization.

Compare this to rateyourmusic, a website I have been using regularly for years. They are also very anti-censorship and include Nazi material on the site as it is meant to be an encyclopedia of all the music of all time. However, they put warnings on any page that contains Nazi material with a disclaimer that the site does not support that content and that it’s simply there for their mission of cataloging music. RYM also is made up of user input. If a user uploads something that isn’t tagged properly as containing Nazi material, their upload will be rejected. Other users vote on whether a submission is adequate.

Here's what RYM puts as a warning on their site:

I like the internet archive. I use it regularly. It’s an incredible resource and a fantastic organization. I just wish they would do more to keep Jewish people safe.

[zetzhao]

Imagine Luke Arnold as Long John Silver in Treasure Island

(With reference to the 1952 film adaptation of Treasure Island.)

I love that moment: "Give me a hand up!"