guillermo del toro said so many insightful and funny things last night at the frankenstein q&a that i started taking notes. these are all direct quotes. i love this man.

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@gentlemidnightsnow
guillermo del toro said so many insightful and funny things last night at the frankenstein q&a that i started taking notes. these are all direct quotes. i love this man.
Sirens Rising, Gaurav Gupta
Discussions of trans women in sports often focus on elite/professional sports which honestly I find it hard to care about but the more common scenario of “we’re going to legally ban a high school girl from playing sports with her friends because she’s trans” is just profoundly evil
i remember when utah's (republican) governor ended up vetoing a law banning transgender students from playing high school sports when he looked at the numbers, and there were only four trans students in the state playing sports at all. he released a clumsily worded but surprisingly compassionate statement about the decision.
I must admit, I am not an expert on transgenderism. I struggle to understand so much of it, and the science is conflicting. When in doubt, however, I always try to err on the side of kindness, mercy, and compassion. I also try to get proximate, and I am learning so much from our transgender community. They are great kids who face enormous struggles. Here are the numbers that have most impacted my decision: 75,000, 4, 1, 86 and 56. 75,000 high school kids participating in high school sports in Utah. 4 transgender kids playing high school sports in Utah. 1 transgender student playing girls sports. 86% of trans youth reporting suicidality. 56% of trans youth having attempted suicide. Four kids and only one of them playing girls sports. That’s what all of this is about. Four kids who aren’t dominating or winning trophies or taking scholarships. Four kids who are just trying to find some friends and feel like they are a part of something. Four kids trying to get through each day. Rarely has so much fear and anger been directed at so few. I don’t understand what they are going through or why they feel the way they do. But I want them to live.
of course, it didn't amount to much. they overrode his veto. it's just so cartoonishly evil. an entire state's political body so desperate to terrorize this one little trans girl.
i am not a psychiatrist but i do find it really weird how autism checklists are so often focused on "outward" signs of autism rather than what is going on internally. i don't know how to explain it but "do you make eye contact with other people" feels like a much less relevant question than "how does it feel when you have to make eye contact with other people?"
while i'm here, the other one that always pisses me off is "do you interpret idioms literally, for example 'bull in a china shop'?"
well, no, obviously. i know what "bull in a china shop" means because that is a popular phrase with a clearly defined meaning. and if i hadn't heard it before, then i would still not interpret it literally, because it has the cadence of an idiom and i would probably be able to work out from context what it meant. what is the point of this question
third and final complaint: "are you good at noticing subtext?"
i feel like the problem with this question is best illustrated by a conversation i had with a friend a while back, where i said something like, "i feel very safe with you because you don't do subtle hints and you are always very straight-up with me about what you are thinking and feeling."
and he laid a hand on my shoulder and was like, look dude i'm gonna be straight up here. i am subtle with you constantly and you simply do not notice <3
@luckyybones hope you don't mind me screenshotting but you are actually so correct
Zac Posen’s gown for Claire Danes for the Met Gala
Literally like something out of Stardust.
This is what it looks like in daylight and low light. So gorgeous.
There really really ought to be a book about how the staple crops of different civilizations shape and influence those civilizations, and I really want to read it.
Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky and A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage (three are alcohol, three have caffeine) are not quite that, but may still be of interest?
I read Salt back in the day and it's so so good, second the rec. I have heard of 6 Glasses and not read it but I am sure I would probably love it. Gotta see if the library has it. Thank you!
Gonna throw Empire of Cotton by Sven Beckert in the ring here! You'll never see the modern world the same way again.
A Short History Of The World According To Sheep by Sally Coulthard blew my mind. So many things are tied to wool and sheep and weaving and so many words and phrases are tied to wool, people have no idea.
Example words which come from textiles/weaving, if not specifically wool (go look them up!): subtle, shoddy, tabby, Brazil, rocket, twit, warped, going batty, on tenterhooks, text...
I'll throw in a rec for Pickled, Potted, and Canned by Sue Shephard - a very interesting look at food preservation and how the availability of different types of food preservation shaped cultures and cuisines.
Sweetness and Power is this but for the topic of sugar
The Lost Supper: Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past might also be up your alley. It's about "forgotten" foods and staples. They talk about different types of wheat, sauces, veggies, etc and a little about the cultures from whence they come
Also: Much Depends on Dinner by Margaret Visser. One of my favourite books.
DO I HAVE A SERIES FOR YOU. University of California Press has a gift for you and it is a 80+ book series on food studies. There are even some that are open access (legally free), but the rest are in libraries.
I also highly recommend Frostbite by Nicola Twilley. It’s about the impact refrigeration has had/is having on food preservation and culture, globally. It was one of my favorite books of this last year.
Also, The Rice Theory of Culture https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1172&context=orpc By Thomas Talhelm
Consider the Fork isn’t about food itself exactly but all about cooking technology and how it changed how and what we eat
Abolish the comic book industrial complex 🙂
not sure if that tag is a reaction or an example
More and more often these days, in what is surely a sign that everything is just absolutely fine, I find myself recalling the wise words of the prophets written on the subway walls:
I think the best most human thing in the world is strangers doing a silly thing together
Examples:
- guy at work "Yes, and -" ing the bit me and my coworker were doing where we pretended to be owners of a fantasy medieval tavern not minimum wage retail staff
- at the gay club when Die Young by Kesha came on and two hundred people, all dancing and drinking separately, jumped up and down to make the "- beat of the drums *STOMP STOMP*" as loud as possible
- person who watched me stomp round the beach singing a made up song about breakfast foods to name a cat after and suggested more breakfast foods that would be good cat names
- guy who started a dance off with everyone across the road while waiting for the lights to change
- very tiny girl at the pharmacy interviewing everyone in the queue and every single one of us in turn sat down and answered this toddler's questions like we were on Letterman
The three pillars of humanity, in no particular order, are Joy, Absurdity, and Sharing
Alright, to ao3's soon to be arriving Wattpad Refugees, a basic guide to general user culture:
1.) Unlike Wattpads vote system that let's you like each chapter, the ao3 equivalent kudos only allows one per work. Everyone is generally quietly annoyed about this. To engage with each chapter, you're heavily encouraged to comment. Trust me, it makes people's day.
2.) Ao3 has no algorithm. By default it's latest updated work first. You can find things to your taste through searches, filters and tags.
3.) 'No archive warnings apply' and 'user has chosen not to use archive warnings' mean two very different things. No archives warnings means the work is free from any content that could require a warning tag (character death, graphic depictions of violence, non-con, etc). User has chosen not to use archive warnings means it could contain any of the warning content, be it hasn't been explicitly tagged. Treat it like an allergen. No archive warnings apply is allergen free. User has chosen not to use archive warnings, may contain traces or whole chunks of the allergen. If you're likely to have a bad reaction, maybe don't take the risk.
4.) Speaking of warnings, ao3 has very few restrictions on the type of work that's allowed. Whatever your personal thoughts or feelings on that are, thats how the site is. You're likely to run across some dark subject matters and a lot of people are uncomfortable with reading that. You're well within your rights not like these works and have your opinion on whether they should be allowed, but harassing the authors of such works (or any works) is more likely to come back on you than them. Ao3 operates on a strong policy of 'don't like, don't read'. Use the tagging system to your full advantage to only engage with the kind of works you want to see.
We look forward to welcoming you all and seeing the fantastic works you create. Happy writing!
I went down the Clark whump hole and found Lubania. My heart is shattered
lubania never fails to put me in the meat grinder
god i still need to make a lubania post
so in the original story, world’s finest 192-193, clark flies to Lubania (a fake communist eastern european country, because this was published during the Cold War) to help with a disaster, but ends up depowered and captured by the country’s evil dictator and put in a concentration camp along with batman, who had come by to rescue him. they are starved and put through various interrogations and tortures, and eventually escape by secretly switching places so that bruce sleeps in clark’s kryptonite-irradiated cell, allowing clark to recover and eventually bust them out.
in Superman Red and Blue, john ridley takes this already-whumpy original story and remixes it.
in it, an older clark returns to a post-communist lubania for the first time, ostensibly to interview one of its wealthiest entrepreneurs, but in reality to face his own fears and unaddressed trauma from his original time there. In this story, there was no batman to keep him company- clark endured everything alone.
It’s a lot of trauma.
the wealthy entrepreneur he came to interview turns out to be koslov himself- rehabilitated and made filthy rich in the aftermath of the fall of communism. clark sits down at a restaurant with the man who tortured him, did “things” to him - a man who has no idea who he is - and asks him whether or not he feels remorse.
in the end, clark muses on whether to run his story- an exposé on Koslov’s exploitative labor practices- despite fearing no one would care about it. Koslov himself was able to rise to power, to torture clark, because no one cared, or was brave enough, to stand against him. but clark makes the decision to publish it, because he - Superman - will always care. And in this way, decades later, he makes his own stand against Koslov.
and that’s the story of lubania- how clark was depowered, put into a death camp, starved, tortured, and heavily implied to have been sexually assaulted every day for eight months. and then went back years later to look his demon in the face, because the exposé he was writing, if it helped even one person, was worth reliving one of the worst events of his life. because Superman cares.
bruce being incredibly normal about clark, as per usual
Moon cake and pond cake 🌙 ✨
Moon cake and pond cake 🌙 ✨
Things i need, alhaitham and aranara interacting. Just a bunch of lil friends sitting with Sliver Nara while he talks and explains about things.
Just a baby haitham reading and a bunch of aranara keeping him company, him explaining things in the books to aranara when they ask him questions. Haitham seeing aranara when his jaddatuh passed and they kept him company alot when he read by himself 🥺🥺. Though haitham would pretend they didn't exist he appreciated they're company so much at that time
“Sliver Nara is cold, but he’s a really nice Nara! “