ojovivo
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Peter Solarz
Not today Justin
Misplaced Lens Cap
YOU ARE THE REASON
★
blake kathryn
Discoholic 🪩
Product Placement
Origami Around
ellievsbear
pixel skylines
@theartofmadeline
we're not kids anymore.
AnasAbdin
occasionally subtle
sheepfilms
will byers stan first human second
Monterey Bay Aquarium
seen from T1
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seen from Malaysia
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seen from France
seen from Belarus
seen from Malaysia
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@lemonmoxy
Strahd: [smug and bitchy] Until the game is over, you are forbidden to communicate. If I suspect you to have broken this rule, your lives are forfeit. 19-year-old blindfolded cleric: Hey Strahd. [holds up middle finger] What am I communicating?
I forget straight people have a really bad habit of using top/bottom to mean dom/sub until I’m talking to someone who calls a women in a m/f relationship a ‘top’ and they get mad at me because I think they meant she’s pegging the guy. Apparently they mean she’s just kinda mean and controlling in bed. This is like the 3rd time this year this has happened.
Being into m/f ships is hard because you will look up “Top [women] Bottom [man]” and all the posts will be incorrectly tagged dombottom women/subtop guy and if you ask people to correctly tag stuff you are the bad guy. I want to her fucking him in his hole!!
BWHAHAHHAHA
my high school english teacher would often critique our literature analysis work by pointing out: "you're treating these characters like they're real people. They're not. They're characters". And it took me a long time to understand what he meant by that. Because I always thought "isn't that the point? That writers want to write characters to be so three dimensional that they act and feel like real people?" but that's not it.
Characters are tools a writer uses in service of a story. Of course characters can be written with depth to the point they feel real to us, but they exist in service of their narrative. Something real people aren't beholden to at all. When discussing characters, I think it's easy to accidentally see these characters as "real people" and not extensions of the author's beliefs. Tools for a narrative. Means of storytelling.
Putting the term "Catholic guilt" on a high shelf where fandom can't reach it until everyone learns how to identify characters who are very very clearly coded as Protestant.
“oh no, my audience has begun to guess the big twists of my story and are accurately predicting what will happen!”
incorrect response: write the rest of the story to be as twisty, shocking and counter to expectations as possible, regardless of whether this is a logical or satisfying way for the plot to go
correct response:
can someone elaborate on the “make hoax” and “post angry tweet about “leak”“ part. i’m stupid and don’t understand things
sure!
(you’re not stupid. I posted this thinking it would amuse a handful of mutuals who all knew the context and that would be about it, so I didn’t think about providing any other explanation. I had no idea it would spread this far.)
I’ll start from the very beginning just to be thorough. so this is Alex Hirsch, creator and head writer of Gravity Falls, a show which had a big focus on mystery, conspiracies, codes and ciphers, etc. the whole plot is kicked off by one of the main characters finding a mysterious old journal in the woods, which detailed all kinds of weird and supernatural things, but then ended abruptly with the author saying they had to hide the journal because they were being watched. the central driving mystery of the show, therefore, was the question of who wrote the journal and what happened to them.
now, the thing about Gravity Falls is that, while it must be said that the writers weren’t always quite as sure of their plans as we tend to like to think they are, it is very much a fair play mystery, with legitimate clues to what was going on. but the writers were caught off guard by how quickly the show attracted a dedicated audience, including a lot of people outside the primary presumed demographic, who started solving the clues faster than expected. so some of the fans were able to correctly guess who the author was before it was revealed in the show, and the theory started spreading. this put the writers in something of a panic, because this was THE mystery that the whole story revolved around, with ¾ of the show building up to the dramatic reveal in the middle of season 2. they wanted it to be a mystery that could be figured out, sure, but they weren’t prepared for people to solve it so far in advance of when it was planned to be revealed, which would have really taken away from the big moment. they weren’t going to change the main story itself, but having been caught unaware by how much attention the fans were paying, they wanted to up the ante and make the mystery more complex to solve going forward–but first they needed to buy some time and throw the fandom off the scent for a little longer.
hence, Alex’s plan as described above. they whipped up a fake shot that appears to give away the identity of the author as being another character in the show, put it on a screen in the studio as if it was a real animation frame, took a picture of it, and ‘leaked’ it online. it was initially decided to be a hoax (albeit, I think, presumed to be a hoax originating from outside the production team), until Alex posted this tweet:
…before quickly deleting it (though not so quickly that it didn’t get seen, of course).
it worked well enough to distract most people for a while, and wasn’t revealed as a hoax until a year later, when an episode aired that definitively proved that the supposed screenshot could never have happened, at which point Alex owned up to the whole thing as seen in the tweet above. by then the episode with the real reveal wasn’t far off, and while people did still work it out ahead of time, it was more of an “OH MY GOD I KNEW IT!” moment than a “booooooring, we’ve known that for ages” moment, which of course was what the writers wanted all along.
personally I find this a fascinating approach to dealing with the problem of spoilers, because it doesn’t affect the story itself at all; if you watch Gravity Falls today–or if you were watching it when it aired without any significant contact with the fandom–you’d never know about it. ultimately, the problem the writers were facing wasn’t that some people might guess the answer to the mystery–they never wanted to make it completely impossible to predict–so much as it was that they hadn’t designed the story to stand up to so many people working on the puzzle together, which resulted in a sort of total output of puzzle-solving ability that far outstripped the capability of any one solo human being. so their solution is something that’s very much targeted toward delaying that group problem-solving, without actually affecting the experience of any individual person watching the show.
plus, it’s very in keeping with the overall tone of the show.
and now you know!
if your audience guesses the ending of your story
don’t:
change the ending
do:
gaslight them
Its actually so crazy to me that it is still so stigmatized to have body hair as a woman like what the fuckkkkkk what the fuckkkkkk thats not even like a social convention associated with men thats just like a bodily function what the fuckkkkkk
A lot of criticism of delivery apps focuses on the fact that they offer convenience and variety, which I find much less compelling than criticizing the fact that the apps often send their contractors on fetch quests from Hell.
There are real labor problems here. Base pay is often insulting. Customer tips carry too much of the burden. Workers need better protections, more transparent algorithms, protection from arbitrary deactivation, and actual recourse when the app or a customer screws them over. Car-dependent delivery is also an environmental and infrastructural problem, though in a denser city I’d still be doing this work; I’d just be doing it by bike.
But when people talk about delivery work, I rarely see them talk to actual delivery workers. I see a lot of abstract arguments about convenience, consumer decadence, “hustle culture,” and internalized neoliberalism. Meanwhile, when I’m out working and waiting in restaurants for orders, the other Dashers I meet are usually people who only speak Spanish, people who read as neurodivergent, visibly physically disabled people, or some combination of the above.
I have not met this mythical Disco Elysium poor ultraliberal hustlegrinder-wannabe people seem to be arguing with. Maybe that archetype exists somewhere. If it exists among any kind of gig worker, it would probably be rideshare drivers. But most of what I see looks less like “rise and grind” and more like “this is one of the few forms of work available to people who need flexibility, low barriers to entry, limited managerial surveillance, or a way to work around language barriers, disability, burnout, chronic illnesses and injuries with symptoms that come and go unpredictably, caregiving, résumé gaps, or discrimination.”
That does not make the current system good. It means the current system is filling a real gap that a lot of supposedly better systems do not even acknowledge.
As a disabled person who is burnout-prone and demand-sensitive, contracting as a delivery driver has given me an unprecedented level of financial flexibility. I can work when I have capacity. I can stop when I’m deteriorating. I can build my day around my actual body instead of being trapped under a manager who thinks “reliable” means “able to perform the same way every day no matter what.” That matters. It does not cancel out the exploitation, but it is also not fake just because it is politically inconvenient.
And delivery itself is not some inherently decadent evil. Sometimes people live alone. Sometimes they are sick. Sometimes they are disabled, exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, overloaded, or recovering from something else - perhaps the stress and fatigue induced by their own job. Sometimes they need medicine, groceries, or a meal that will actually unplug their sinuses instead of whatever generic community-care slop someone thinks they should be grateful for. Humans are allowed to need specificity. “Food” is not the same as “the food I can actually eat right now.”
A serious labor critique would ask how to make delivery work safer, better-paid, less tip-dependent, less car-dependent, less algorithmically punitive, and less precarious. It would ask what kinds of flexible, accessible work should exist for people who cannot thrive in conventional employment. It would ask how cities could support bike delivery, worker cooperatives, public infrastructure, and real protections without simply replacing one bad system with a moral sermon about how nobody should ever want takeout.
But a lot of the discourse does not do that. It treats convenience itself as suspicious. It treats wanting flexible work as false consciousness. It treats the needs of disabled people, immigrants, and other people who can't fit into traditional employment structures as details to be swept aside in favor of a cleaner political image.
I guess the opinions of delivery workers only count when they are politically convenient.
Just watched Adam Conover (of Adam Ruins Everything) make such a solid point that I think we should spread far and wide. Yes, having AI write your emails is lazy, sure, but people love being lazy. We need to really emphasize that sending AI emails (or using AI responses on social media, or publishing AI flyers, or or or) is rude.
It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.
It's rude.
MY FINGERS BARELY EVEN TOUCHED YOUR STUPID FUCKING AD STOP REDIRECTING ME TO THE APP STORE
Because SOMEHOW people need to be reminded of things from literally ten years ago:
"Free the nipple" never meant "free to not wear a bra" or "free to breastfeed." Those were adjacent conversations that of course "free the nipple" supporters would boost, but that was NEVER the core of free the nipple.
The core of free the nipple was always that the breasts of people perceived as women ("female-presenting nipples" to use some Tumblr speak) are in no way different than the breasts of people perceived as men. And that since the chests of people perceived as men are not sexualized and are allowed to be exposed, so too should the breasts of people perceived as women. If men can be topless, so can women. If it's inappropriate for women to show their chests, neither should men. It isn't sexual assault for a woman to walk around barechested, because it isn't sexual assault for a man to do so either, and breasts are NOT sexual organs.
Claiming breasts are inherently sexual organs is factually and morally wrong, it is sexist and controlling, it is a tool of oppression, and it defines normal body parts (and bodily functions) as sex which leads to inherent sexualization of people with those parts. It leads to 12 year olds with large breasts being accused of seducing 40 year old men or trying to distract and corrupt their classmates.
"Free the nipple" doesn't mean "free the nipple in a god-fearing way." It means FREE THE NIPPLE, full stop, end of sentence. It means to free the nipple of the faulty social constructs that cast it as a sexualized, malicious force of seduction instead of a normal body part that should be free of expectations of shame or "modesty."
Breasts and nipples aren't shameful, sexual, immoral, porn-adjacent, kinks, a distraction, or things to be feared. They are a part of your body just like your elbows and ankles, and being afraid of them, thinking they will corrupt some innocent person or that being exposed to them is trauma akin to sexual assault, is the entire fucking problem.
Free the nipple, not just for breastfeeding, not just from bras, but from the fucked up social constructs that cast them as malicious instead of innocent. Stop trying to sanitize "free the nipple" for puritanical, conservative audiences who already hate you and the rest of us. You aren't helping anyone.
Free the nipple means FREE THE NIPPLE.
something charmingly twentieth century about this
This counts as a spell
Placeable AOE effect
My Fitness Coach is a Dark Wizard [Complete]
it would explain so much about Gotham economics if it turned out the only employers who pay a livable minimum wage are 1) Wayne Enterprises duh, but mainly 2) all of Gotham's assorted villains.
sure henching comes with shitty working conditions, but the benefits package is crazy competitive. they have dental
Gotham's villains are so engrained because supervillainy is the only thing propping up the local economy. henching requires no work experience, provides on-the-job training, and has a diversity hiring program (you're willing to commit crimes in tacky matching uniforms? great you're in, here's your gun and clownsuit)
Batman is constantly throwing money trying to compete but the fact remains that henchpeople are Gotham's largest workforce and will be until minimum wage laws catch up to reality
even educated jobs in environmental science are probably getting laundered money from poison Ivy. and a lab equipment tech might notice three different jobs are tied to pamela Isley and also happened to receive grants from "unrelated" shady shell orgs and the next one is setting up a temperature controled penguin habitat for some eccentric obvious mobster.
half of Gotham's supervillains have doctorates of course they're also funding the sciences (for crime purposes but still)
we need a new supervillain who gets drawn into villainy specifically to make money for funding grants. they come up with a theme and wacky outfit and loony backstory but at the end of the work day they change back into their alter ego (tired scientist with bags under their eyes and a hotpocket stuck in their labcoat). they're actually very mild mannered irl—the villain persona comes from their background in Theatre Arts
And this is why Bruce Wayne keeps trying to fund scientific research. But he doesn’t have the means to fund everything. So yet again villainy ends up still being the largest source of academic funding in Gotham.
When you request funding, if it’s from Wayne enterprises you need to include a bit about how it’ll benefit society. But depending on the shadow org you’re getting it from, every professor knows you need to include stuff about how it might progress or benefit efforts to potentially cure incurable diseases, or progress our understanding of extreme emotions like fear, or protect the environment, etc. There is one company where you merely need to mention penguins at some point, so there’s an academic paper out there about the effects of poverty on the LGBTQ+ community that happens to use a fictional community of penguins as example all the time. Two different organizations only give grants if there are enough puns in the request. And there’s one that seems to only give grants to researchers who want to solve some difficult scientific quandary, some big mathematical or linguistic puzzle or paradox that no one has figured out yet.
under US law, it's illegal for anyone who's not a member of a recognised native tribe to own an eagle feather. the penalty is a $100,000 fine.
14 years ago when I had recently moved to Alaska, I went hiking with an Aleut friend, and she pointed to a feather lying on the ground and said "hey that's a bald eagle tail feather, you should grab it!" and I was like "uhh I'm very white and that's very illegal" and she went "they're fuckin everywhere up here man. I have 20." so she grabs it off the ground and hands it to me and says "there, now it's a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person."
and I'm like, okay, cool, I guess this is how we do things in Alaska. nice.
so I keep this bald eagle tail feather around for years. display it in my home among other cherished memorabilia from places I've lived and visited, etc.
on a whim, I have just now looked it up. there is no exemption to that law for a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person. the last 7 years I lived in the US, I was technically a bald eagle poacher.
probably a good thing I don't intend to move back there anytime soon. I wonder what the statute of limitations is on bird crimes.
@freedomisscaryshit I'm fucking dying I think you forgot the word "feathers" in your tags?? or do you just wish you could grab whole ass eagles that land in your yard??
As an Indigenous person, it continues to astound me that there are such strict laws (written by White people) in our name, laws against...picking up things just found on the ground. Like, stop pretending this is "for" us. We don't want this.
so, for clarity, that's not what this is. the law against possessing feathers is an anti-poaching measure, derived from a North American treaty protecting certain migratory bird species from hunting. that treaty has an exemption for indigenous people to allow tribes that use eagle feathers in ceremonial or religious practices to continue doing so.
i used to collect feathers (illegally) as a teenager and the thing is that it's incredibly important for feathers from wild birds to be illegal to possess because it ensures that they never become fashionable to wear. the reason we passed the migratory bird act was because the american and european fashion industry was driving species to extinction in a timespan of years. not just decades. the ecological devastation of exporting birds for hats was absolutely insane and people were watching wetlands and forests and meadows just empty out in realtime. look at the wikipedia article for the plume trade.
the law against 'picking feathers up off the ground' means that you can't go shoot an eagle then sell the feathers on etsy by saying you 'just found them'. you can't own them no matter where they came from, which makes sure that they're not going to come from any birds killed and then secretly disposed of.
these laws, as harsh and ridiculous as they seem, saved flamingos, spoonbills, egrets, and all kinds of hawks and eagles from extinction. the minute these laws weaken and people can make money off killing them again, they're fucked.
no matter how normalised it gets I will die on the hill that it is rude to record strangers in public without their consent
