this is NOT about not being productive, i cannot believe how many people in the notes are telling me that pursuing hobbies isn't a waste of time i KNOW that. what i mean by "complete and utter inaction" is doing nothing. not only am i not being productive or pursuing any goals, i'm also not doing any of the myriad things i know would bring me joy. i'm not doing hobbies, i'm not hanging out with friends, i'm just sitting around rotting away for no discernible reason
Not sure if this one's been done yet, but after doing a bit of digging, I found an original, full-size version of Angus Mcbride's art of Saruman and his orb, aka "Pondering My Orb" meme. (Yes, this is actually Saruman.) Unfortunately, I could not find the original title, if there ever was one.
After comparing a couple others, this was the best version I could find in high quality.
Now you, too, can ponder Saruman's orb in full, high-quality wizardry.
thinking about how Mew Mew Kissy Cutie in Undertale/Deltarune's universe is a copyrighted anime property. we've never met the "real" Mew Mew because there isn't one. she's a branded fictional character from an in-universe anime. both Mad Mew Mew from Undertale and Pink from Deltarune are NOT Mew Mew, they are at best abstractions or imitations of Mew Mew as interpreted by Maddie/Pink. even the darkner that spawns from Pink's body is not *actually* Mew Mew, it's just the flower shop dark world's interpretation of how a Mew Mew doll would act once given consciousness. I feel like it connects to Deltarune's deeper themes of narratives deriving from other narratives. Deltarune the game IS the legend IS Lord of the Hammer IS Dragon Blazers, and meanwhile they're all very different. A copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. Pink both IS and IS NOT Mew Mew. Mew Mew doesn't technically exist within Deltarune's world, we only vaguely know about the "real" Mew Mew as an in-universe character because these derivatives of her exist. we never watch Mew Mew Kissy Cutie, we just hear Alphys talk about it. a story told about a story we never get to see. every retelling slightly different. play with me in this space.
Rewatching Truman Show for the first time in a long time, and the detail that’s stuck with me this time is the set design.
The characters drive modern cars and hock modern products, but it’s all presented with a veneer of 1950s wholesome applecheeked Americana. Truman’s life is presented as an escape for the audience from the drudgery of the modern day, and the aesthetic they’ve chosen for this is the post-war economic boom. This is the simple time, the movie says. This is the good time. Doesn’t the modern day suck? Let’s go back and see our friends from the days when life was good.
And it’s a lie. Truman’s life is a lie, and the image of white picket fenced suburbia they’ve presented is a lie. It’s an elaborate construction to recreate a false memory that’s comfortable for advertisers. The movie is a satire, but it’s also a very blatant statement against the nostalgia for a golden age which never existed. It’s a lie. It doesn’t exist.
I don’t know. I’m spitballing. I’m biased because I despise mid-20th century Americana and I naturally treat it with hostility, but it’s very gratifying to see a movie kind of agree with me.
Earlier in the summer, I went to Florida with my friend. We decided to visit a town nearish to where we were staying called Seaside, as we had heard it was a cute place. What I did not know at the time was that Seaside is the place where they filmed The Truman Show. It was a "master-planned community," constructed in the 80s to be the perfect beach town.
Seaside, FL
Seahaven
And yes, it really does look Like That. Not just in their tourist-agency photos, in real life it looks like that. Arguably the irl Seaside is even prettier than movie Seahaven, because the the office buildings where Truman works don't exist; the town is 100% cutesy homes and little shops.
Every single house is pastel with white trim and a white picket fence with the family's name on it in a handwritten font. The streets are paved with red bricks and lined with palmettos, and families bicycle past. The streets are clean, the lawns manicured, the sidewalks pristine.
Soon after we arrive my friend says as we walk, "God I wish I could live in a place like this. Imagine having the money to live in a place like this." I reply, "I don't actually know for me...it's gorgeous don't get me wrong, but there's no grime, you know? Where's the grime? I'd feel uncomfortable. It feels like there's not a dive bar for a hundred miles."
We reach the town center, which is a wide square lined with shops on one side, food trucks on the other. We have a lovely time looking through the shops, though I start feeling kinda weird, and I'm not sure why. Probably the extreme cleanliness of the area is making me feel off-kilter. And the surreal feeling of walking through areas I recognize from The Truman Show only adds to the weirdness.
We go into a clothing store, and it's crowded with people who appear to have stepped out of a Land's End catalog. It sells boring tshirts, shorts, and sundresses in whites and blues, all needlessly expensive. Employees walk through, refolding already-pristine shirts. So perfect. "Anyone buying from here is so rich they can probably smell the poor on us," my friend jokes, "that's why they have so many employees refolding things, it's to fix anything we brush against." "Or even breathe on!" I add.
We continue on to the grocery store where, in the movie, Truman finds Marlon stocking the vending machine and first tells him he suspects his world is wrong. I buy some pasta salad there to eat for lunch (all the cafes are quite expensive), and we find a place to sit and eat. As my friend finishes up her food, I write a postcard to my sister, telling her about my trip overall and my day in Seaside, describing the town as 'vomit-inducingly picturesque.' (It has been weeks since my visit and she still has not received that postcard)
Lunch done, we decide to walk down to the beach and have a swim. And I realize something about the surreal feeling. "Weird question," I say to my friend, "have you seen any non-white people here? Am I imagining that?"
She pauses. "The lady cleaning the bathrooms?" she asks.
"No I mean vacationers. Guests, customers. Other than you, I haven't seen a single one who wasn't white."
"...No. I haven't either."
And now that we see it, we can't unsee it. It's a wealthy area, so I had been expecting it to be pretty white, but the fact that there is not a single nonwhite person who isn't working a service job feels so gross. It's as though the place is somehow still segregated, like we have stepped back in time, but not to the fun, fake, rock-n-roll-and-soda-parlor-nostalgia version of the fifties, but to the real racism-and-repression fifties.
It is so fucking weird and sinister. I feel I have stumbled into another realm. All these people giving us sideeye, riding around on their golf carts in their pristine $45 seaside-branded tshirts, taking pictures of the perfect houses all lined up in perfect rows. A whole town of Meryls wearing lulu lemon.
We walk on. It's hot, and a swim is exactly what we need. Surely they can't ruin the ocean. I myself am extremely excited to swim, because now that we've spent a few hours among the pompous populace, I want to piss in their perfect ocean more than anything in the world.
We walk along behind the beachfront bar patios that line the beach toward the access point, and the ocean looks so blue and inviting. Although the hedge growing between us and the dunes is strangely tall. "Huh," I think. "It's weird that they'd grow it like this, it blocks the view for everyone sitting on the patios."
We arrive at the boardwalk, and there is a man standing there. He says "Hold on! Do you two have a beach access pass?" I look at him in disbelief. It's a public beach, but the sign behind the man says you have to rent a beach chair to use the beach, and it's $35 per person. We glance at each other, turn wordlessly, and head back to town.
I seriously consider trying to sneak onto the beach somehow, because at this point I am very invested in the idea of pissing in their ocean, but I realize that with the tall hedge it would be nigh-impossible.
We went home after that.
So many reviews for Seaside on travel websites mention how they love to visit Seaside because they feel transported, they feel it reflects a "simpler time" or a "peaceful life." It's been weeks and I can't stop thinking about my experience. It really drove home how...complicit people can be in their own ignorance. A lot of people want to live in that perfect bubble, and especially if they have the money, they can maintain that barrier. It reminds me that part of the reason I often have trouble persuading these types of people is because they simply do not want to be persuaded. They're so proud to be the place where The Truman Show was filmed, but I rather doubt they really think about what it means that they live on a movie set, in a surreal dream.
Honestly visiting Seaside was a 10/10 unique experience. I would highly recommend it as a place to go for a couple hours if you're gonna be nearby and want to feel like you've been kidnapped into The Truman Show and/or your brain has been put in an easy bake oven. It's like a zoo for superrich WASPS. We had a really good time loudly making fun of how insane it all was, invading their little paradise with our riffraff energy. Treat it like an excursion into the jungle; you're gonna have to park a half mile away minimum, and bring all your food and water with you so you don't have to buy anything. You don't want to give them any money. They have enough.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, next time I go to the panhandle, I will be going to the nearest free public beach access to Seaside, and I will walk to the Seaside area of the beach, and I will piss in their ocean.
i can't really picture what a version of me who's "healed" looks like. being a cynical thistle of a person is just... the only thing i've ever been. joy, creativity, connection, healing, those are things the others get to enjoy. i don't know how to do those things. there's no version of me who goes frolicking through the flowers, i'm just the part that expresses hurt and uses self-hatred to keep the others from running wild... even being myself around people is... i'm not good with vulnerability. i'm not trusting. i'm not even nice. i don't know anything about love or hope. just leave me in the dark.
I do not want to presume, but it sounds like what you want is some quiet, non-judged comfort in your life, with a time and a place to just be, to sooth those jagged edges.
Hard thing to come by, that, in our churning world. Even those scummy billionaires seemingly cannot afford it! Ah, sorry for getting away from the topic.
Well, just try your best at being kind at yourself, in all the ways you can.
When I was training to be a battered women’s advocate, my supervisor said something that really blew my mind:
“You can always assume one thing about your clients; and that is that they are doing their best. Always assume everyone is doing their best. And if they’re having a day where their best just isn’t that great, or their best doesn’t look like your best, you have to be okay with that.”
Any now whenever anyone in my life, either a friend or a client, frustrates me, disappoints me, or pisses me off, I just tell myself They are doing their best. Their best isn’t that great today, but I have days where my best isn’t that great either.
Op I’d like to thank you for sharing this. Ever since the first time I’ve read it I’ve held it in my mind and it really has helped me to be kinder to others and to myself.
I wish I was better about paying attention to channel names because I did watch a video a while back and this was basically the whole video summed up. Like, everyone knows Light was an arrogant fool who sewed the seeds of his own destruction but his solution to the societal problems he lamented about in the first chapter was literally something only the juvenile son of a cop could have come up with.
To Light, Crime was the source of society's "Rot." And his philosophy on what constituted "crime" was basically about normal-ass people who were willing to break the law. you know, the laws Cops enforce.
It also explains why he's indiscriminate rather than surgical. Because of his own biases, he never stops to consider the flaws in the methods of who gets arrested, or how that never actually seems to have an impact on Crime Rates tm. Cops (like Light) simply see this as evidence that they're not arresting enough people! That they're not going far enough! And these are the values our protagonist was raised with. A surgical strike would let Real Criminals off the hook, while targeting people who, yes, may be more evil by orders of magnitude, but they do it in a LEGAL way!
I don't think the story ever consciously addresses this. The Watsonian explanation for that would be that we don't really get to see exactly WHAT values Light's dad instills in his children - he's a major character, but Light spends far more time putting him on a pedestal than actually engaging with him. A couple Doylist explanations might be either that Ohba didn't condone Light's actions, and considered an outside exploration of his motivations to be either uninteresting to explore, or perhaps too much of a challenge to pull off in a story that so heavily revolves around the protagonist's inner monologue. I think it's far more likely, though, that this wasn't intentional - Light's dad was a cop so that he could be on the Kira taskforce and we could get the drama of Light being hunted by his own father, and the blind spots that created for both characters. Knowing the story, and how these characters are used, I find it hard to believe there were intentional ramifications beyond that. But that doesn't change the fact that they're there, and more than anything it serves as an explanation for why Light was the way he was.
Tbh I think the "but data centers are important infrastructure, not just AI" talking point misses that like
Ok so roads are important infrastructure. A lot of stuff that's important happens on roads. Now, let's imagine that quadrillionaire Matt Stench has decided that the next big tech innovation is the Wide Car. It's a car that takes up six lanes despite seating only one passenger.
The Wide Car is supposed to be the future, and everyone's going to be driving Wide Cars, even though nobody who makes Wide Cars is turning a profit. Employers are offering Wide Cars as an employee benefit, and getting "nah." Some employers are going as far as demanding their employees drive Wide Cars, and the result is that people take time out of their workdays to get in the mandatory gas usage for their Wide Car before driving home in a regular car.
In spite of the fact that the Wide Car is clearly set to fail, there's an enormous push to expand to twelve-lane roads to accommodate a bunch of Wide Cars that simply will not materialize. This is not an organic response to demand, but a speculative investment that amplifies the existing issues with road development for no good reason.
Oh and the road infrastructure project is buying up resources other people could have used for literally anything else. With money they promise they'll be making from Wide Car sales any day now.
Okay so what I'm getting from the notes is that when you try to transplant some techbro nonsense into an offline equivalent, you have to be careful to avoid simply inventing something the Americans are already doing in real life
New (old) The Ghost in the Shell is kinda weird, and I'm not sure how to feel about it. Very direct adaptation of a classic manga from early 90s, attempting to straddle high effort homage to 90s anime while inserting some cyberpunk elements that we know more about with decades of both genre and our real world developments.
It is weirdly anachronistic in both directions, its direction is all over the place, the pacing is so weird it was probably made with intention of being uploaded directly into your brain. And yet, I cannot deny its charm.
This one may not be a banger, but it is certainly an art statement.
theartofmadeline
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
stormborns
gamechangershow
vaporwave
