My most-despised sex scene cliche is ~hand-holding~. It's overdone, it's melodramatic, and it's a lazy shorthand for intimacy (and I guess, penetration/orgasm??). But the main reason I hate it is because NO ONE DOES THIS IN REAL LIFE!
Like, can you even imagine stopping mid-sex to do this? It doesn't make anatomical or physical sense. You need your hands during sex to do things like hold yourself up or brace yourself against something. Lacing your fingers together might be romantic, but it would bring the actual fucking to a screeching halt.
As usual, Heated Rivalry gets this right where so many others get it wrong:
I.e., if your hands happen to end up near each other during the deed, sure, you might grab on - but notice that it's not the focal point of the action.
Bridgerton also has a good example of this - their hands happen to coincide, so they grab on:
But note that neither of these examples are depicting penetrative sex, and usually that's where the dreaded hand-holding crops up. I'm sorry, but that makes no sense. If the sex involves trying to vigorously smash your lower bodies together, I guarantee your hands and arms are going to be busy bracing/supporting/clinging to each other or the nearest leverage-granting object - not your partner's hands.
(There's a whole 'nother issue I have with what characters do with their hands in written sex scenes, but that'll have to be another post.)
So this is my official request to Hollywood: STOP MAKING THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE HOLD HANDS DURING SEX SCENES. Watch Heated Rivalry on repeat if you need to, and learn how to depict intimacy and romance between the sheets without resorting to a dumb cliche that bears no resemblance to actual sex.
autism tests are so funny. I'm extremely literal most of the time, but people don't tell me that generally, so I'm inclined to answer disagree. because I'm taking the statement too literally
Spying on kids to save kids from spying is very, very stupid
Iâm on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaurâs Guide to Life After AI. Catch me TONIGHT (Jun 23) in TORONTO at Osler Records, and TOMORROW (Jun 24) in NYC at The Strand. After that, itâs Philly and Chicago.
The literature on harms to kids from online platforms is complex and nuanced, rife with people citing small, ambiguous studies as iron-clad evidence that kids are being destroyed by the internet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ype6c6DdHQY
It's a weird coalition of anti-Big Tech campaigners (who are rightly angry at the platforms' callous disregard for user welfare) and Heritage Foundation-backed culture warriors (who think that if their kids aren't exposed to LGBTQ content they won't come out as queer). While there's plenty these groups disagree about, they share one consensus: there should be a "minimum age" for certain kinds of internet use.
The problem is, there's no such thing as "age verification" for the internet. What we call "age verification" is actually mass surveillance, so invasive and pervasive that it makes the ad-tech industry's commercial surveillance look like some kind of cypherpunk darknet pirate utopia:
"Age verification" means that everyone who does anything online will have to submit to fine-grained tracking and recording of all their online activities. This nightmare is the surveillance advertising industry's fondest dream, a world where it's literally illegal to avoid their tracking, all in the name of saving kidsâŚfrom them!
So it's not just a weird alliance of anti-Big Tech crusaders and the conspiratorial right that's pushing for age verification â they are unwitting allies of the very tech industry they think they're fighting. Those tech industry insiders are fully aware that an "age verification" mandate is really a way for the government to teach every child how to use a VPN. They're also fully aware that the next move is to ban VPNs:
Tech bosses are the ones sitting on our shoulders saying, "Go ahead, swallow that fly â it'll be fine. And if you do have to swallow a spider afterward, well, that'll surely be the end of it":
Behind them is a long line of caliper-wielding grifters who claim they can use your phone's camera to distinguish a child who is 17 years, 364 days old from an adult who's just turned 18:
It's beyond farce. After all, whatever harms you believe the internet is inflicting on kids â and there's absolutely some kids who are being harmed by their internet use â those harms all start with surveillance. Your kids can't be targeted by algorithms without the surveillance data that's being used to target them. They can't be funneled into pro-anorexia content or extreme misogyny forums without that funnel being primed by commercial spying.
Why do tech companies spy on your kids? The same reason your dog licks its balls: because they can, and no one stops them:
America hasn't updated its consumer privacy laws since 1988 (when Congress banned the disclosure of your VHS rentals). The EU has the GDPR, but it also has Ireland, the country where all GDPR cases against Big Tech go to die, because any tax haven inevitably becomes a crime haven:
Other countries have privacy laws to varying degrees, but are grossly outmatched by US tech giants, who have fused with the Trump regime, to the extent that Trump will impose penalties on your country if you attempt to regulate his tech companies â he'll even have your top officials cut off from the internet in retaliation:
Any attempt to save kids from online harms should start with saving kids from online surveillance, but that's the opposite of what we're doing today. After decades of failing to pass and enforce privacy controls for the internet, those same governments are breaking all land-speed records to pass "age verification" laws that make privacy illegal:
The fact that these bills have the firm backing of the tech industry's most controlling, most spying companies tells you everything you need to know about them:
Kids are being harmed by online spying, and so are the rest of us. Whether you think that the algorithm made Grampy go Qanon or you're suspicious that online surveillance data was used to deny you a loan, a job, or a lease, you should want privacy:
You can't protect kids from online surveillance by spying on them. You just can't. Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to get you to swallow a fly so they can sell you a spider, a bird, a cat, and an ICE chud in a gaiter, Oakleys and plate carrier (beneath which lurks a stick-and-poke Totenkopf tattoo).
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I'll throw in the wonderful Eizin Suzuki into this ring too, a man whose work just breathes light without actually using dynamic lighting in the usual way. It's no surprise both Nagai and Suzuki are both considered prolific in art pertaining to the city pop genre because they're able to paint these kinds of scenes with a delicate touch.
This feels like I could trip on that radio and fall right into that water, feeling the crystal waves as I drop in.
And this, a nice stroll down a resort strip, where my sunscreened skin could literally feel cooked if I leaned too close to the tiling.
And then a nice stretch of summer street, wherein you could see your face in the flushed red of that car provided it didn't blind you from its sunny reflections.
I don't think I even need to say anything more, Suzuki's a massive influence in how he even places colours so warmly in such unorthodox manner. It's a naturally sunkissed talent~ đ
I love the idea of Shaneâs chirps just being observations.
It started when he was a kid and he was trying to help everyone get better at hockey including the opposing teams players, he would say something like âyour stick grip is weakâ or âyouâre slow on your rightâ (idk i donât know hockey very well ESPECIALLY little kid hockey) but he says it totally deadpan because little Shanebug doesnât understand tone yet.
This makes the other teams so mad! They try and fight him constantly! Little bitty baby hockey fights and then Yuna sits him down in middle school after the first fight that he actually gets hurt (black eye and bloody lip) and asks him what he is saying to make everyone fight him?
âNothing mean I swear mom!!! Iâm trying to be nice and help correct their formâ
And suddenly Yuna gets it and explains to Shane that not everyone but especially not the opposing team likes to have their flaws pointed out to them even if itâs coming from a good place and how that could be seen as chirping.
So he stops for a while, then his coach for world juniors tells him to try and piss off Rozanov enough that they can draw a penalty. So Shane does what he does best and points out a flaw at each face off. Jokes on him though because Ilya is actively changing those things and getting better every face off because he is taking it for what it is, advice.
Which pisses Shane off, he thinks his chirping tactic wonât work now that he is older. So he points out at his first scrimmage at practice in Montreal that the center who has been there for years (who he is probably replacing) is favoring his left side is staying too far left to compensate (again I donât know hockey so I am trying to translate things I know about soccer lol)
And the center loses it on him! Immediately yelling about the lack of respect and how a rookie makes it to the MLH and thinks they are hot shit.
So Shane realizes his chirping DOES work just not on rozanov and becomes a menace he studies game tape specifically to find holes in his opponents game and pre prepares chirps and it fucking works because all these men are so far up their own asses that they just get mad instead of using the advice.
Idk I just needed Shane Chirping but in a very Shane way. Like he really just wants to play hockey but chirping is part of hockey so he studies chirping but doesnât want to do any of the âclassicâ chirps (your mom! Your wife! Your girlfriend! Youâre gay! Type of stuff) so he invents his own chirps out of his amazing mind
The thing about Miss Piggy is that she kind of has a Roger Rabbit comedy superpower where she wins nearly any conceivable fight she's in. But unlike other characters of which that's true, like say, Bugs Bunny, who tend to win because they make the opponent play the game with their rules, Miss Piggy wins because the joke is that she can beat the shit out of literally anybody.
apologies if anyone has already pointed this out but i just realized ilya chose to wear a turtleneck to his father's funeral therefore his mother's necklace is not visible......
it's also tucked away when he's in sochi in episode two while his father is still alive, his brother is harassing him through texts, ect
and noticeably absent here when he's caring for his father during the summer in ep 4
but of course the moment when he's alone in moscow in ep 5 after his father has passed and he's speaking to shane, it's out. the details of this show will make me go insane
Okay justice for Ilya Rozanov, a man who notably managed his entire families finances and his dementia-having fathers caretaking since he was literally a teenager, while also essentially raising himself to be an elite, generational athlete by himself.
like what is this âIlya needs the threat of a sex ban to pick up his socksâ slander or this âIlya has terrible financial literacyâ misinformation or this âIlya only eats junk food and needs to be forced to eat his veggiesâ tomfoolery
