An actor is an athlete of the heart.

Katey. Blogging, acting, music, art, comedy and LGBT. This blog is a combination of what I like and how I feel.

[valtsv]

I have no relevant skills.

I am unpleasant to work with.

I like to cause problems.

[eatyoursupper]

hired

[maplebungus-deactivated20221118]

everyone interviewing for a management position

[murdershegoat]

had a conversation with my friend about how career atheists are hacks because they spend all this time deconstructing religion and proving it wrong when really the only concept of religion they’re using is christianity and so honestly why should i listen to you when your entire thesis is ‘i didnt like sunday school’

anyway and then my friend said the funniest thing ive ever seen:

[afloweroutofstone]

It’s Time to Break Up Disney

The company known for Mickey Mouse is now a sprawling conglomerate in entertainment and beyond, and that’s a big problem.

I’d like to thank The American Prospect for giving me the opportunity today to publish my first ever article in an actual established outlet, hopefully the first of many. Here’s why I think we need to break up the Walt Disney Company.

This has been an incredible year for the Walt Disney Company. Not only has Avengers: Endgame become the best-selling movie in box office history, but Disney currently holds all four slots for this year’s top-earning films. However, the company’s dominance isn’t quite something to celebrate.

At the moment, almost 38 percent of all U.S. box office sales in 2019 have gone to a Disney-owned movie, down from a peak of over 40 percent earlier this year. And that’s even before coming releases of Frozen 2, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, and Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker. As we can see by looking at the U.S. box office over the last 30 years, Disney has more than doubled its already significant market share in just five years, reaching an unprecedented point in modern history for a film company…

Within the next couple of years, there is a good chance that the majority of all money made from wide-release movies will go into the pockets of the Walt Disney Company. Even if you consider yourself a dedicated Disney fan, this should concern you…

The Walt Disney Company is no longer the gentle giant of film and animation of yesteryear. Today, Disney is a multinational corporate conglomerate that takes in over $10 billion a year in profits alone. Its consistent growth and strategy of buying out other firms has put the company in a position of nearly unprecedented power in the U.S. media market, and thus in the global media market as well.

This position gives Disney the ability to offer lower-quality products, crush competitors, squeeze profits from other markets, influence politicians in its favor, and more. As the controversy around modern monopolies heats up, it is becoming clear that we need a generalized revitalization of antitrust law in the United States. As part of such a campaign, Disney too must be identified as a monopolistic corporate titan in severe need of being broken up into a number of smaller companies in order to restore both fair competition and the sanctity of American democracy.

[titleknown]

Reblogging because, I will say as someone who’s been relatively…. salty  in the past over your media takes, I’m surprised how even-keeled and not-condescending this was. 

My favorite quote (bolding mine):

This is perhaps the best case for why Disney’s monopoly status is a problem even for fans of Disney and its subsidiaries: The lack of powerful competition means Disney simply doesn’t have to make as many films. Based on the numbers above, the Disney of today would likely have never approved the making of lesser-known fan favorites like Air Bud, James and the Giant Peach, Ed Wood, or O Brother, Where Art Thou?, nor would they have agreed to distribute Japanese masterpieces like Howl’s Moving Castle or Spirited Awayin America.

Reduction in the quantity of movies doesn’t mean an increase in quality; it may well mean the opposite. When Disney decides what ideas to put money behind, they aren’t doing it based on the actual quality of the movie, but on its potential profitability. Ed Wood, one of Disney’s worst-selling movies of 1994, has a 92 percent from critics and an 88 percent from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. Compare this to Beverly Hills Chihuahua, a film that made 16 times as much in net gross but received a 40 percent and 52 percent, respectively. Guess which would get made today?

I’d also cite Tron Legacy and The Black Cauldron as those sorts of experiments that’d never be done today, perhaps even Kingdom Hearts, and I have a hunch that my Disney-fan friend @friendlytroll​ would find that a compelling argument.

But, there is one caveat I will add: Any movement to break up Disney needs to be inherently entwined with the movement to reduce copyright duration, because the current copyright monopoly due to its overextension is what’s fueling this “consolidation creep”

Like, I will say, the way copyright has been expanded and the possibility of narrative crossover (A natural tendency of human storytelling, if you know your history) being tied to the “generosity” of a monopoly is an extremely classic “enclosure of the commons” scenario. 

Doubly so when one considers the re-conceptualization of copyright as a temporary legal protection to a god-given right, or even the backlash that is punching down at people for their desire for crossover rather than protesting its capture.

I say reduction back to 56 years, retroactively as per the previous extensions, is the most solid idea, specifically because of its precedent in previous copyright law and it being long enough to help individuals more than mega corps*, and also because; essentially; if it were done, everything Walt did during his lifetime would be public domain.**

And, I think the public would be way less willing to back Disney, as some of the cynics suggest they would, if the proposition were framed as “Break up Disney and give its stories back to the people,” rather than “Break up Disney, fuck you sycophantic fan-drones” 

So yeah, we cannot separate the fight to break up Disney from the fight to reduce copyright, because the expansion of copyright is the major force driving their consolidation creep. #56OrBust Y’ALL!

*Though, I will say also that in this law there’d need to be a program of reparations paid by the corporate rightsholders to those families whose works will lapse because of this, who did not get proper restitution from the corporate owners of said works in the creator’s lifetimes. 

Cause, the treatment of independent creators as “collateral damage” is far too common in copyright-shrinking discourse, and a thing we need to talk about, but that’s for another post.

**This also goes for most of the major Marvel superhero properties Disney uses, all the Carl Barks duck stories Duck Tales was based on, and all of the 1950s monster movies that Fox’s big franchises were basically modern revamps of.

[bogleech]

Actually didn’t we used to have laws specifically against being this big of a conglomerate? I could swear when I was a kid it was all over the news that some huge corporation was taken to court and broken up into smaller companies. Am I imagining that? If I’m not, what changed and when?

[afloweroutofstone]

@bogleech​ A lot of people have replied to this, but I’d figure I’d give my own answer. You’re likely thinking of US v. Microsoft in 2001, which was the last truly major anti-trust case that the US government has brought. The short answer to your question is that the laws still exist on the books, but have been reinterpreted over time by conservative scholars like Robert Bork who argued that anti-trust laws not only should be narrowly focused on specific economic criteria (a myopic understanding of “consumer welfare”), but also that that was indeed the original intent of the laws. Though this is demonstrably false, the neoliberal revolution of the 1980′s and beyond solidified its position among other absurd doctrines in the consensus of Washington policymakers.

Here’s a segment of my article which was cut for length:

Anti-trust laws aimed at breaking up monopolies were weakened to the point of irrelevancy in the 1970’s and 1980’s, in large part due to Chicago School economists who claimed that the laws should only serve an extremely narrow economic purpose. But from the beginning, anti-trust laws had not only economic considerations in mind, but political ones too. In his excellent book on our modern monopoly problem, “The Curse of Bigness,” Tim Wu notes that Senator John Sherman, the namesake of the trust-busting Sherman Act, feared that when “the concerted powers of this combination [‘of inequality of condition, of wealth, and opportunity’] are entrusted to a single man, it is a kingly prerogative, inconsistent with our form of government.”

Others agreed. In Standard Oil Co. v. U.S., conservative Justice John Harlan warned in his partial dissent of “the slavery that would result from aggregations of capital in the hands of a few individuals and corporations controlling, for their own profit and advantage exclusively, the entire business of the country, including the production and sale of the necessaries of life.” Later, in a dissent for another case, Justice William Douglas added that the Sherman Act was passed out of the view that “all power tends to develop into a government in itself. Power that controls the economy should be in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not in the hands of an industrial oligarchy.”

The conservative Chicago school interpretation of anti-trust not only ignored the variety of harmful economic effects of corporate concentration that didn’t meet their specific criteria (effects on wages, innovation, business formation, etc.), but they also completely ignored the political case for the laws. That’s what I mean when I say in the article that “Many of the pioneers of antitrust law were not only worried that monopolies are inefficient and rig markets, but also that they are undemocratic and rig governments.” If you’re interested in the topic, I’d highly recommend that book I mentioned, Tim Wu’s “The Curse of Bigness,” which is a great recent read on the evolution of anti-trust in the US and why we should bring it back.

[parakeet]

hold on everyone i have a terrible idea

[parakeet]

[cheese24k]

[vua-deactivated20160828]

oh my god

[friendley-deactivated20200102]

everyone needs to see this video at least once in their life

[andromedafalls]

I think my favorite thing about dogs is that they can, in fact, perceive the tone/mood of music, just as they can with human voices.

[theteastainedpages]

I think the best part about this is that there was an actual academic study done to find out what music dogs preferred, they set it up by kenneling dogs and figuring out which kind of music caused them to be more relaxed in the situation, and they found out that most dogs prefer soft rock and reggae. 

He probably really digs it. 

[abbf26]

the news is bad sometimes

[thegreathamedebate]

Okay but what’s the phone

[sailor-arashi]

As advertised:

[abbf26]

thats what cain used to kill abel

[chasing-asterion]

Okay but for real think of the possibilities.

People in remote areas (both recreationally and living) - hiking or dangerous areas if they’re lost, hurt, or scouting ahead

Homeless people

Disabled people (to alert for help or contact vital services

Areas of extreme poverty (see all above)

Lost people (either urban or rural) able to call for help

Somebody close to death able to record all final thoughts (either injured, terminal, trapped, or unable to have constant medical care)

Children always able to call for help

Abused people - hiding a phone without worrying about it needing to be recharged

[spruce-wayne-deactivated2020120]

it isn’t bad at all, we’re just so used to phone companies trying to make paper thin phones with no battery life cause it’s good for business

[katey-boheme]

I’d say better for the environment if implemented well too, less electronic waste from busted phone chargers

[bramblepatch]

Nicholas J Fury spent one weekend in the 90s hanging out with a cool lesbian and then spent the next twenty years trying and failing to find another superhero with her general degree of competence or emotional maturity

[shakespork]

nick fury watching the events of civil war unfold: carol wouldn’t do this to me

[perfecthorse]

[zorri]

*in a horse accent* help

[azaleatown]

This is the horse equivalent of being lost in the sauce

[looking4myson]

astray in the hay!!!!!!!!

[moisok20]

*eyes snap open in the middle of the night*

Mr Incredible helped his clients find loopholes in their insurance claims because it was the closest thing he had to being a hero in a long time

[luidilovins]

*third eye opens* Mr. Incredible originally joined the insurance company thinking that it was the closest he could be to helping people and found out that insurance companies were the real villains and did everything he could to dismantle the opressive establishment.

[whiskeywhitemage]

*seventh chakra ignites* elastigirl thicc

[sparklejamesysparkle]

Elizabeth Taylor’s eloquent and powerful speech while accepting the Vanguard Award at the 11th annual GLAAD Media Awards in 2000. (1 of 3) After her dear friend and co-star Rock Hudson announced that he had AIDS prior to his passing in 1985 (the first high-profile celebrity to do so), Elizabeth—against great opposition during the fear-based AIDS hysteria and stigmatization prevalent in the 1980s—immediately organized a fundraising benefit to raise money for AIDS research (she later stated that she had the phone hung up on her repeatedly while trying to enlist the help of other celebrities with the benefit, and that some people thought she was “crazy” for getting involved with the cause). After Rock passed away on October 2nd, 1985, she also organized his memorial service and soon after became the co-founder (alongside Dr. Mathilde Krim) of the first AIDS research center amfAR. Her separate Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation was established in 1991 with the specific focus of providing nutritious meals (as well as medical and financial assistance) to people living with HIV and AIDS. She also lobbied the U.S. congress to contribute more money for AIDS research and education, devoting the last twenty-six years of her life to the cause. After Elizabeth passed away in 2011 at the age of 79, a large portion of the $115,932,000 raised at the Christie’s auction of her legendary jewelry collection was bequeathed to her charity in order to continue providing the services and assistance she believed were important in perpetuity.

[joanofarchetype]

“Let us put it generally: if a regime is immoral, its citizens are free from all obligations to it.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago.

[Pictured: Captain Pia Klemp sitting in a chair beside her controls.

@VivianAngrisani on Twitter wrote on 6/8/2019: “Pia Klemp, a German biologist & boat captain faces 20 yrs in prison for rescuing 1,000+ migrants at risk of drowning whilst crossing the Mediterranean. Seeking asylum is a human right. Only 1 in 100 sea captains are female. This woman is a humanitarian, not a criminal. #FreePia”

@Galactic_Rabbit quote-tweeted on 6/10/2019 and wrote: “Thinking about all those videos of people honored in their old age for hiding/protecting Jewish people.”]

[joanofarchetype]

To all the people commenting that she’s an accessory to “illegal immigration,” note that seeking asylum is a human right. Countries which refuse asylum are in violation of the Geneva Convention. They get away with this and propagandize complacency towards the victims by using bureaucracy to complicate immigration proceedings. During times of genocide, this is tantamount to hearing a would-be murder victim knocking on your door and locking the deadbolt.

People who risk dying getting smuggled across borders do so out of sheer desperation because the situation they’re leaving is worse. Finally, you are missing the entire point: violation of the law is warranted when the laws violate human rights and criminalize existence. Laws which call immigrants “illegal” are tools of a systemic negligence designed to condemn those who need legal protection the most.

[joanofarchetype]

Oh and here’s the petition to #FreePia.

[dryad-wraith-deactivated2020091]

Reminder that if you’d ever wondered what you’d do during WW2, if you ever thought “I’d never let that happen”, or “how could people do that?”…. well what you’re doing now is your answer. How you react to this heroic woman is your answer. How you react to refugees is your answer.

[archive95205-blog]

[shaniae]

Reblog in 10 seconds and $1700 will come your way

[trainhardrunfast]

I have nothing to lose and 1700$ to gain

[deanhoney-deactivated20220819]

me, age 12, watching elizabeth swann becoming pirate king:

[frawgs]

how much scarier would a frog be if it ran instead of hopped .. u just hear plat plat plat plat coming towards u and u look down and it’s a frog going at full speed

[spaceepigeon]

[largishcat]

Me, trying to explain my obsession with southern gothic and weird alt country: look I don’t know why, but if a song is acoustic, in a minor key, and about murder, god, or america, i just go absolutely batshit

[gutterband-deactivated20200828]

Here’s my song “God’s going to murder America” in G minor

[largishcat]

I’d listen to that on repeat for five weeks

[wombshaker]

I remember a white kid in my class talking about how his parents made 320k combined and they still “struggle” and thinking to myself: “It’s probably because they don’t know how to manage their fucking money and live above their means, but sure, just pretend it’s not their fault”

A few minutes later, he mentions that they vacation 3 times a year, own 3 cars, and spend $1000 a week (A WEEK) on food.

Long story short, I refuse to feel sorry for any of you upper-middle class folk that pretend you’re struggling financially too when you just have no sort of financial management skills.

[jamaicanblackcastoroil]

I remember reading about a couple who were both dentists and said they were living “paycheck to paycheck” but spent 10k a month.

[there-is-still-some-liquor-left]

my mom, turning up “we will rock you”: football babey!

me, internally: straight people think they understand queen which is cute

[there-is-still-some-liquor-left]

it’s gay pride darling