i reblog things @mcchickemns - Tumblr Blog

in all seriousness i better not see a single gif of that fuckass harry potter show on this hellsite.

don't make them, don't post them, don't reblog them. just don't give free advertising to a millionaire giddy over stripping trans people of their rights.

parasocialites

how did a woman manage to date elvira for 19 years and not tell every single person she knows

what if the new pope is problematic :/

infectiouspiss

omg what if the new pope is a proshipper o_o or- or a multifandom blog 0_0 or worse... a rpf truther eek >_<

fearedfreak

howtocan

Baby bird season is incoming and I’d like to remind everyone that birds do not have a significant sense of smell. Bird parents will not reject birdlets because you have handled them.

If you see smol birbs with few or no feathers on the ground, you can safely put them back into their nest, bird parents will still care for them.

If you see smol birbs with some or most feathers on the ground, please leave them there, as bird parents are probably nearby watching and feeding.

jumpingjacktrash

nakey bird = accidentally fell out, is cold and scared, put back in nest! if you can’t reach the nest, try to put it on a wide branch or fork so predators can’t get at it as easily.

scruffy feather bird = starting to try the fly thing, not very good at it. only put in nest/branch if predators abound, i.e. you have four outdoor cats and they’re licking their chops.

fluffy feather bird = smol fly guy! do nothing. can probably get away from predators and will flip its shit if you pick it up.

thefingerfuckingfemalefury

Reblogging this because I’d always heard the ‘Don’t touch a distressed bird its mom will reject it’ thing treated as fact before now, I didn’t realise it wasn’t true…

illogical-bullshit

Spring is coming, time to reblog this again.

energyprison

i feel like being in the crystal for a week would honestly be worse in the long run than being in the crystal for a century. like a century sounds worse and for a while it would be, but a week isnt enough time for the individual days to start feelin like nothing. like you would feel the entire week whereas after long enough the century would become indistinguishable from a single moment

energyprison

txttletale

to put it very simply -- if you are any type of socialist at all you should find the defense of labour rights in the face of generative AI vital and the defense of property rights in the face of generative AI laughable. conflating the two is the indicator of an incoherent politics of Vibes

pengychan

I mean I know a certain level of projection on fictional characters and situations is inevitable and even healthy, but sometimes you got to step back into the real world to remind yourself that Character X is not your shitty parent/abusive ex/asshole boss/bully from high school, and that people who like Character X are not personally victimizing you.

decepti-thots

equius

op is getting death threats now probably

museeeuuuum

lighthouseweeper

The consequences of shutting down the Institute of Museum and Library Services would be particularly dire for smaller museums and rural muse

stuffman

People have written a lot of touchy-feely pieces on this subject but I thought I’d get right to the heart of the matter

sqbr

[The artist, putting a simple cake next to a much fancier one: “Aw man, that guy’s cake is way better than mine.” The Audience, gleefully holding up a knife and fork “HOLY SHIT! TWO CAKES!”]

elvencantation

additions from the og artist (credit)

scientia-rex

“Holy shit two cakes,” I mutter to myself as I do fucking anything these days, this post was a godsend

ninjaotta

this tweet has DESTROYED me

guerrillatech

no-passaran

Renters burdened by unaffordable housing costs may be at a higher risk of dying sooner, according to a new study published in Social Science

teabree-shark

gaylor-moon

grippy3000

fun fact one of the world champions in pepper-eating contests is a trans woman and she actually faced significant backlash because people somehow thought she had a biological advantage. to eating spicy pepper

grippy3000

update bc i went back and checked: her name is brianna “the chilli queen” skinner and she set a record in 2017 by slamming back 23 carolina reapers consecutively. she only stopped when told to by the referees, and the next year she stepped down out of boredom. queen

pettyartist

Here's a picture of her, by the way

And her super supportive wife

nentuaby

The championship, it should be noted, is unisex. Apparently being a trans woman gives you an innate biological advantage over both cis men and cis women.

vexwerewolf

The innate biological advantage of being cool as fuck

artbyblastweave

Steven Universe is interesting to me because it’s got the most extreme dichotomy between ideas that would be better fleshed out in a show for adults, and ideas that are interesting specifically because they’re native to an unironic children’s show.

dandelion-reblogs

Can you elaborate on this? It seems interesting.

artbyblastweave

Sure. This is gonna be a long one.

Here are two things I believe about Steven Universe:

First, Steven Universe has a lot of high-concept science fiction worldbuilding concepts that it is not really interested in engaging with, because it is not what the show is about. These include:

The radical alternate history of the world, including the changed division of the states, the fact world war 2 possibly didn’t happen, the absence of Russia, the cultural fallout of California (somehow!) being flyover the way the Midwest is often treated as in real life. All of these are, like, hugely interesting, and totally ancillary to what the show wants to do, so they’re exclusively used for one of gags.

The presence of “Roadside picnic”- style depots of abandoned alien technology all over the planet, including in places that teens are capable of casually accessing in some cases, as well as the presence of wandering inhuman monsters that have coexisted with humanity for as long as there’s been agriculture. This is the kind of thing that should have a much larger impact on the shape of culture than it was shown to, and the main reason it doesn’t is because the show is thematically about Steven acting as a bridge between the two mostly siloed worlds- but the world is implicitly big enough that stuff should be happening without him and around him! And yet you never get anyone remotely curious about any of it who don’t use Steven as an entry point.

The occurrence of a massive extraterrestrial war in the show’s backstory, with thousands of superpowered aliens fighting an ideological rebellion against their totalitarian homeworld, culminating in a giant not-qute-but-arguably-worse-than-a-massacre, and including ideological infighting among the “heroic” side about how far is too far. All issues famously better unpacked in a show for adults.

The biology and society of the gems themselves. Generally examined in broad strokes as needed to make the story work, but many of my favorite SU fan works are the ones that do deep headcanon dives into the how and why of the gems- what are gems, how did their culture come to be, what does the day-to-day look like, why do they all have weapons by default, what was their militarization for, what are the mechanics of fusion, why do fusions always have a coherent aesthetic concept if cross-gem fusions aren’t supposed to happen, what are the implications of a society where “wall decoration” is a job that a sentient being is custom-engineered to fill, often digging even further into the horrifying implications of their society than the show itself could get away with.

However.

Steven Universe has a number of emotional arcs, character arcs and trope examinations that work so well specifically because Steven Universe is unironically a show aimed at children. One one level, this is because you have to adapt really mature themes and arcs so that kids will get them and so the suits will let you; on another level you have to pull it off with the constraint of 11-minute episodes, you have to work with the strengths and weaknesses of animation, you have to throw in the flashy stuff that kids watch cartoons for. And that leads to some beats that, in terms of pure craft, are interesting in terms of how they’re executed in the specific context of a kids show.

Rose’s arc, particularly the fact that her death is suicide-coded as all-get-out, and her behaviors are allowed to ripple forward, benefit and damage her survivors in a consistent way in a way that I’ve never seen- in a children’s show.

Pearl’s abandonment issues, rampant projection, complicated feelings regarding Steven and Greg, her treatment of Connie, her difficulty forming an independent identity and the ways in which that hurts the people around her- in a children’s show.

Amethyst’s arc, her guilt simply for being born (and what that’s a metaphor for), everything that’s implied about her dynamic with Greg and Rose in Maximum Capacity, her identity problems and lack of cultural context, all unpacked over the course of dozens of episodes of a children’s show.

Lapis’s bumpy, non-linear recovery arc, including her toxic relationship with Jasper and an excellent approximation of an emotionally abusive relationship with Peridot, all- and I cannot beat this drum enough- in a children’s show. Similarly, Sadie and Lars’s whole thing and how that was given space to breathe and play out.

And of course, Steven himself. Steven’s long term arc is normally something you would find in a show like The Venture Brothers, something that’s willing to play off the tropes of the kid hero while being very much aimed at an older audience, with a level of detached parodic irony baked into the execution (since they’re often unpacking specific characters via expies.) Steven Universe is literally the only children’s thing I’ve seen on TV that, even as it does all the unironically fun adventures and misadventures, also does the work to examine how much being an archetypical wholesome Saturday-morning cartoon kid hero would screw you up, and we watch it happen in real time, and there’s a whole season fully highlighting the damage his status as a kid hero has done to his identity. And I can’t stress enough the degree to which the impact would be lost if this arc hadn’t been done “in house;” if Steven Universe Future had been done twenty years from now as a deconstructive parody of a nostalgia property, it would suck. It wouldn’t land.

Steven Universe is a show that taught me to meet a story where it’s at, and judge it’s success and failures in terms of what it chose to prioritize, and not what I would have wanted to prioritize had I been writing it. Because at the end of the day, it’s fine to let the high-concept nerdbait setting elements fall by the wayside in favor of prioritizing the character-driven thematic stuff and genre analysis stuff.

(Indeed, I feel like it was a very pointed choice to have this whole OC-friendly gem-with-weapons-and-powers character-design schema and then have huge chunks of the show where the fighting and custom weapons and monster hunting weren’t relevant to what was going on, they lure you in with the promise of a RWBY-style monster-fighting show and then do mostly slice of life. Very funny trick.)