Franz Kafka, 1912
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@flyby-fleance
Franz Kafka, 1912
Saying that a certain group of people is too privileged to complain about the way that things are is its own sort of defense of the status quo
Like if a white person from the American suburbs who had doctors for parents says "the suburbs are set up in a way that's designed to alienate the people within them from their neighbors growing up there can be an incredibly lonely isolating experience" and you respond with "shut up you had everything you ever wanted growing up" you are sort of pretending that this asocial way of living we've set up based on harmful ideas like castle doctrine and individualism is in some way desirable for someone when the reality of the situation is that everyone is miserable.
Oh boy this is popping off. But I just want to put on this post that this isn't just about the example that I used this is also when people get mad at you for complaining about aspects of living in America because other people are getting bombed by America how dare you, or when (usually neurodivergent) white people complain about how wasp monoculture is high key hostile to be raised in, or when people with middle class jobs complain about the shit their boss pulls, or any other number of situations in which a relatively privileged potential ally talks about the unique ways the oppressive systems we're looking to overthrow effects them negatively. Like yes sure if you have a minimum wage job it's annoying to listen to someone with a salary and benefits say "my boss treats me like shit and my company is doing x evil thing" but if you're in that situation and you're actually down for the cause instead of just here to play oppression Olympics, you want to gain allies in this fight by saying "have you considered unionizing" instead of pushing people away by saying "shut up at least you can afford rent"
I watched TRON (1982) and TRON LEGACY (2010) back to back and I want to tell you what makes a TRON plot:
A counter-culture hacker has a strained relationship with the ENCOM tech company. They sit at a desk (with their back to a big laser) to poke around a computer system, then get lasered into cyberspace by a rogue intelligent program that has taken charge of its program society through militaristic cyberviolence. The hacker is briefly forced to play deathsports (video games) before fleeing into a cyberworld they don't understand, joining forces with anti-fascist cyberallies while constantly on the run, trying to get to a big glowing cyberbeam in order to get home and also defeat the rogue ai's cyberplan to spread its cybercontrol to human society. There's a cyberguy named Tron who -and this is essential- is only important to the plot once. Profit-driven tech leaders get deposed. The visuals are state-of-the-art and indulgently weird, often beautiful but also confidently overreaching their capabilities. Philosophical questions of life and meaning are raised but never explicitly explored in dialogue, though messages are ripe for extrapolating. Jeff Bridges is there and he's a pretty chill cybergod.
They should make a new one every 15 years or so forever.
If you had shown me this site in 2005 I would have asked you if had checked your virus software lately, because this looks like a bad one. I would have clicked away so fast it would give you whiplash. Looking at these sites now, I have to convince myself that they aren't virus laden sites and fight against the pavlovian urge to just navigate away.
I navigate away anyways because fuck them, there's usually a better site (though they are dwindling quickly). I still can't get over how the internet "as intended" today looks like a malware ridden fever dream from 20 years ago. This is every story I've ever read about an empire that used to be great and has now fallen into turmoil.
Beloveds, there is a wonderful website that gets rid of all that crap<3
OOOOH.
character misses their shot and the villain goes "ha! you missed." and the main character goes "did i?" and then shoots the villain again while they're frantically looking around the room for what the hero could possibly have aiming for instead
Terry McGinnis: *throws baterang*
Joker: You missed, you bat-fake
Terry: Did I? 😏
Joker: <_< >_>
Terry: *runs up and kicks him in the balls*
Terry: I did 😐
This is canon now
🌶️
The MCU's Spiderman is not a poor execution of Peter Parker's character concept. He's not even poor execution of Miles Morales's character concept.
He is a poor execution of Terry McGinnis's character concept.
Peter Parker and Miles Morales both have so many fundamental pieces to their characters that are just missing for the MCU's Spiderman. Familiar names are floating around him- Aunt May, Mary Jane, Ganke Lee- but the fundamental ideas that make up Peter or Miles arcs just are not there. Themes like Miles's family expectations, Peter's constant money struggles, and the balancing act of doing good vs trying to live your own life are all absent. Even the idea of power and responsibility isn't properly introduced until the THIRD MOVIE when that really should been the central theme from the beginning.
Rather the MCU Spiderman has way more parallels with Terry McGinnis. Both are young hot shot teenagers who end up being taken under the wing of established and experienced hero who is on their way out. Both have complex relationships with their mentor which in a lot of ways serves as the driving force of their character arcs. Both gain high tech suits which enable their heroism. Both are viewed (or at least supposed to be viewed in MCU Peter's case) as heirs to the legacy of this hero.
It falls apart when you get into how they are different. While Uncle Ben is implied to have existed and be dead by the time MCU Peter is introduced in Civil War it's never actually confirmed and never properly comes up. Meanwhile the death of Terry's father is essentially the inciting incident of Batman Beyond: it's what motivates and drives Terry and the murder and it's fallout are the main focus of the first two episodes of Batman Beyond.
What's more MCU Peter's relationship to Tony is grounded in the fact that Tony just shows up one day and essentially taps him to join the Avengers. Bruce by contrast initially tosses Terry out on his ear, and when Terry turns up seeking justice for his father Bruce can't offer him anything but 'go ask the cops for help', and when that goes exactly as poorly as Terry said it would, Terry breaks into the manor steals the Batsuit and goes to stop Powers himself. Terry has active agency in his own choice to be a hero, which helps define his relationship with Bruce and to heroism. While MCU Peter was doing his own superheroics prior to Tony showing up in Civil War (not that he ever does much of that in future movies) his relationship to Tony is defined by Peter's dependence on him and his quest for Tony(/the Avengers)'s approval. And because they don't even bother name drop Uncle Ben or flashback to him, we're left with the impression that the main thing driving MCU Peter is that quest for approval. His motivations are never more complexly explored, and we don't even really see him just running around Queens stopping muggings or car crashes or anything that hints he enjoys or feels the need to actually help people.
And I think that gets into the final and most important difference between the two. Gotham not only needs Batman, it visibly and obviously and terribly needs Batman. Batman Beyond leans into this because decades without a Batman have left Gotham a cyperbunk dystopian hellscape. The city needs someone to stand up to the darkness, to be a symbol of hope, to be aspirational. Terry taking up that mantel means fighting supervillains, yes- but mostly it means doing what the original Batman did. Solving murders, stopping muggings, rescuing people from burning buildings or fighting off street gangs like the Jokerz.
But even in the earliest MCU movies, New York only needs superheroes when the current world ending threat shows up. Otherwise the city is all bright shinny clean streets filled with haplessly content citizens. This is the only reason that Vision's position of 'Our very strength invites challenge' argument in Civil War makes any sense- because the only purpose of these Superheroes is usually to fight a threat they where somehow responsible for creating. And this problem hits 'friendly neighborhood Spiderman' the hardest because he only has a responsibility to use his great power to solve problems, if their are problems in need of solving. Most of Peter Parker's (and Miles Morales's, Gwen Stacy's, or any other Spiderperson's) day is not fighting alien armies or netherworld gods. It's stopping break ins, rescuing people from fires, or other small scale local threats, that none the less benefit from someone with his abilities to make them better. Either New York in the MCU is an ideal utopian city where the police have everything handled apparently (which ha) or Peter is apparently not interested in stopping bad things from happening. He spends so much of the first movie basically begging Tony to give him superhero things to do, not realizing that he could go outside and find people that need help on his own.
In conclusion MCU Peter Parker isn't 'regular Peter Parker but not an underdog', or even 'Miles Morales but white'. He's 'Terry McGinnis but without any agency in his own heroism'.
"Coñon, her hole gotta be that fucking big? Jesus Chri-
Jesús, perdóname. En el nombre de Jesús, perdóname."
I keep doing this weird trick to myself where I'll find a recipe for a new type of rice and beans and decide to try making it from dried beans like the recipe suggests, only to realize halfway through the process that whatever is wrong with my brain makes waiting for dried beans to cook absolutely harrowing
The thing about black beans is that if you, at any point, think "surely they must be cooked by now," no, they're not
(from Pedro Martin's "Mexikid Stories", https://www.mexikid.com/)
Grieve AND organize.
Good article by David Hunter on how to survive the Trump presidency, both on the personal and on the political plane.
The key to taking effective action if Trump wins is to avoid perpetuating his goals of fear, isolation, exhaustion and disorientation.
This is an excellent article. It talks about the psychology of tyranny, the history of resistance and the paths we have to take to rescue each other and recover.
Point #4 especially.
gen z has to reckon with its radicalization problem. you are not a morally pure and superior generation of youth come to save the world, your men and boys are radicalized at an unprecedented level and you ignore it because it’s too hard to address but you have to. these boys are in your classes, they date your friends, you know them and you cannot continue to pretend this is an “old white guy” problem
girls are contributing, too. the coquette aesthetic, the “i don’t want to girlboss i want a man to pay my bills”, girlmath girljob girlmoney. it’s a joke, it’s clothes, it’s whatever, i get it but it is driving a mentality of traditional gender roles and you know you’re joking but your boyfriend doesn’t. your kid brother doesn’t. you have to stop this shit it is a contributing factor
don't give up
Outlive the bastard. You can do it. You being here matters.
thank you so much
You know what, while I'm doing hot takes. And this one may be obvious considering I'm actively contributing to hosting the Solarpunk Aesthetic Week event but like.
Dear everyone who's constantly deriding the aesthetic portions of the solarpunk movement/genre; do you just not understand that being able to visualize the future you want is immensely important to being able to work towards it? Being able to get other people on board with it?
When I first got interested in Solarpunk, it wasn't for the hot leftist takes about the top ways to dismantle the government for the people, or top tips on how to build your own solar panel apparatuses. What brought me in? Visions of a hopeful future. I learned and began to love the rest as I dove deeper into solarpunk circles, but there is no denying that my first intro to it--and likely many people's first intro to it--was via the art and aesthetic spheres. The term 'solarpunk' was literally coined to refer to the aesthetic movement, and we've been building up from there ever since.
'When are people going to realize the aesthetic parts don't matter and what really matters is praxis--' dude, the aesthetic parts do matter. Inspiring people does matter. Showing people visions of a hopeful future is immensely important, it's why so many people join this movement. We see glimpses of what a hopeful future could look like, through beautiful art or riveting stories, we're inspired by things like stained glass and organic designs and statues and fashion concepts--and then we think to ourselves 'how can we help make this future happen?' And we learn the praxis and we work towards the goals and we share it with others because that's just how we work.
Seeing isn't always believing, but sometimes in order to believe in something with your whole heart, it helps to be able to visualize what you want. For yourself and for others.
So yes. The aesthetic parts of solarpunk do matter. Thank you for coming to my TEDTalk.
I found this book very thought-changing, and it forms a lot of my current politics. “The greatest failure of our approach to climate change is our failure to imagine a better future,” Ghosh explains, pointing out that the treasured collective vision of The Apocalypse is a piece of luxury colonialism.
Not just colonialism of action - the West has already decided mentally The Apocalypse will happen, what The Apocalypse will look like, and that the rest of the world will have it first - but colonialism of thought. It’s true! Everyone has a beloved mental picture of the end of the world. I’m sure you can instantly list your five favourite TV shows about the end of the world. Your thoughts about the future are shaped and programmed by this delicious cinematic vision, influenced heavily by religions and online doomprophets and every other book in the world. What will 2060 be like? What will happen to the trees you plant today? The instant answer is a dry, “hopefully I’ll die first.”
Which is the same brain that people bring to plans about the future. Who can work for a future they can’t picture? Who do you know who passionately believes in the better future? Who is actively naming and working for the healed world?
The collective failure of imagination is not just a personal failing, but a collective dropping of a ball that is our duty to hold! It’s failing our one job! It’s dropping humanity’s burden of stewardship because of watching too many movies! It’s a tacit endorsement of every political, economic and religious system that is quite happy for you to bring on the apocalypse as long as you keep them in power. It’s actively working FOR the cause of entropy. In addition to being embarrassing, and colonial, it’s plain stupid.
It’s also a grand call to action for creative types, whose activism in the realm of “saving the world” has been noticeable only in its lack. The people who make fiction have failed to give The People anything to engage with. (Go for Ghosh’s throat, not mine, if you don’t like this sentiment. He found one piece of fiction in all of English that he felt gave the public something for the imaginations to grapple with about climate change - Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.) if this offends you, then do take it as a call to get to work; it’s a collective failure of career choice that fiction can give brains a thousand and one different responses to sexual desire, or five hundred ways to process sexual assault, or three hundred variations on what it would feel like to be at a school that teaches magic, and about one piece of fiction about grappling and grieving for climate change, and that one very fucking depressing, on one of the topics that is changing our planet and future! Let it be a banner to follow, a call to arms! There is no more noble cause.
So yeah, solarpunk aesthetics are pretty revolutionary. They are in conflict against a heavily funded war machine, marketing the collective vision of the End of the World. Against that, what stands? A few hundred people posting art of happy people pretty green cities? Let them fucking post and get them to post harder. These are some of the only pictures people have of a future where their children make it. They are a necessary picture of the future.
Reminds me of this thing I wrote last year, I am learning to imagine the future
Gomez Addams is often appropriately categorized as a wife guy, but very rarely recognized for the himbo that he is
i know it's like a literal 1 sentence post so what did i expect, but liberals seem to be wildly misunderstanding my post about "hating kids being reactionary" as being about "it's a bitchy thing to do to be mean to kids." Which, I mean, yes, sure, but that's kind of besides the point. I think that the reality which I am trying to call attention to is that, beyond being unfair targets of ridicule and humiliation, this ridicule and humiliation exists in service to the fact that children are an oppressed class who are nigh-universally considered property under the nuclear family. this is a problem! it is also a structural problem, which needs a structural critique and a structural and systematic and collective solution. it is not enough to "be nice to kids," rather we must understand children as a particular form of underclass who are denied full personhood.
this isn't quite right. moral and legal personhood are very murky when it comes to children, and this is either lamentable or laudable entirely dependent on the given situation. this is because children are not rational actors, they are not responsible for their behavior. their murky responsibility scales with their age, e.g. 14 year old is held more responsible for their behavior than a 7 year old, but still not at the level of a legal adult. Children are not an oppressed class - they are a group that is VULNERABLE to exploitation and abuse (similar to animals) but this is not the same as oppression. there is an actual distinction here and you're not representing that. Children are not denied personhood; they get it later - they get true moral/legal personhood standing when they hit the age number that is the legally-agreed-upon number for whatever jurisdiction or law or norm we're talking about. (I'm not going to defend any specific age number like 16 or 18 or 21 or 25 - the point is that a number for adulthood exists and societies have collectively agreed to hang their hat on their selected number.)
Full offense and pun fully intended, but I genuinely think the very existence of "dead dove, do not eat" was a fucking canary in the mines, and no one really paid attention.
Because the tag itself was created as a response to a fandom-wide tendency to disregard warnings and assume tagging was exaggerated. And then the same fucking idiots reading those tags describing things they found upsetting or disturbing or just not to their taste would STILL click into the stories and give the writer's grief about it.
And as a response writers began using the tag to signal "no, really, I MEAN the tags!"
But like.
If you really think about it, that's a solution to a different problem. The solution to "I know you tagged your story appropriately but I chose to disregard the tags and warnings by reading it anyway, even though I knew it would upset me, so now I'm upset and making it your problem" is frankly a block, a ban and wide-spread blacklisting. But fandom as a whole is fucking awful at handling bad faith, insidious arguments that appeal to community inclusion and weaponize the fact most people participating in fandom want to share the space with others, as opposed to hurting people.
So instead of upfront ridiculing this kind of maladaptive attempt to foster one's own emotional self-regulation onto random strangers on the internet, fandom compromised and came up with a redundant tag in a good faith attempt to address an imaginary nuance.
There is no nuance to this.
A writer's job is to tag their work correctly. It's not to tag it exhaustively. It's not even to tag it extensively. A writer's sole obligation, as far as AO3 and arguably fandom spaces are concerned, is to make damn sure that the tags they put on their story actually match whatever is going on in that story.
That's it.
That's all.
"But what if I don't want to read X?" Well, you don't read fic that's tagged X.
"But what if I read something that wasn't tagged X?" Well, that's very unfortunate for you, but if it is genuinely that upsetting, you have a responsibility to yourself to only browse things explicitly tagged to not include X.
"But that's not a lot of fic!" Hi, you must be new here, yes, welcome to fandom. Most of our spaces are built explicitly as a reaction to There's Not Enough Of The Thing I Want, both in canon and fandom.
"But there are things on the internet that I don't like!" Yeah, and they are also out there, offline. And, here's the thing, things existing even though we personally dislike or even hate or even flat out find offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable existing is the price we pay to secure our right to exist as individuals and creators, regardless of who finds US personally unpleasant, hateful or flat out offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable.
"But what about [illegal thing]?!" So the thing itself is illegal, because the thing itself has been deemed harmful. But your goddamn cop-poisoned authoritarian little heart needs to learn that sometimes things are illegal that aren't harmful, and defaulting to "but illegal!" is a surefire way to end up on the wrong side of the fascism pop quiz. You're not a figure of authority and the more you demand to control and exercise authority by command, rather than leadership, the less impressive you seem. You know how you make actual, genuine change in a community? You center harm and argue in good faith to find accommodations and spread awareness of real, actual problems.
But let's play your game. Let's pretend we're all brainwashed cop-abiding little cogs that do not own a single working brain cell to exercise critical thinking with. 99% of the time, when you cry about any given thing "being illegal!!!" you're correct only so far as the THING itself being illegal. The act or object is illegal. Depiction of it is not. You know why, dipshit? Because if depiction of the thing were illegal, you wouldn't be able to talk about it. You wouldn't be able to educate about it. You wouldn't be able to reexamine and discuss and understand the thing, how and why and where it happens and how to prevent it. And yeah, depiction being legal opens the door for people to make depictions that are in bad taste or probably not appropriate. Sure. But that's the price we pay, creating tools to demystify some of the most horrific things in the world and support the people who've survived them. The net good of those tools existing outweighs the harm of people misusing them.
"You're defending the indefensible!" No, you're clumsily stumbling into a conversation that's been going on for centuries, with your elementary school understanding of morality and your bone-deep police state rot filtering your perception of reality, and insisting you figured it out and everyone else at the table is an idiot for not agreeing with you. Shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and read a goddamn book.