Name: Milque (or Skin/Skinny/any other variations of my URL)
Pronouns: She/her
Age: Not a minor (This is not an invitation to be creepy towards me; I'm just saying this so that people don't assume I'm a child and block me on sight.)
STUFF I POST
Mostly reblogs and random posts tbh. I'm undecided if I want to post my art and stuff here or on a sideblog.
CONTENT WARNINGS
I tag warnings as "[content] cw". I post gore and horror kind of frequently, but I tag all my posts (or at least list warnings at the top), so it's avoidable.
The Kapok Tree Inn opened in 1958 in Clearwater, Florida.
During its prime in the 1960s, it was described as one of the most over-the-top restaurants in the country and featured twelve different themed dining rooms, each adorned with a massive chandeliers. Scattered throughout the building and garden were dozens of Roman statues, waterfalls and exotic plants. It was so popular that multiple other locations were opened in Fort Lauderdale and Madeira Beach. We featured their sister restaurant, the Peter Pan Inn, on this page last year.
When it closed in 1991, a portion of the property was taken over as a Sam Ash Music Store. The other portion was renamed the Kapok Special Events Center and continues to be used as a wedding venue. Unfortunately, Sam Ash closed its doors last year and remains abandoned.
I’ve included photos of its liquidation sale compared 1960s postcards. I’ve also included a before and after shot of the famous Kapok tree on the front lawn, which dates back to the 1870s.
wait hold on i just realized this is an opportunity to talk about vintage directors/producers/artists who weren't the average white guys. hold on come back we gotta talk about these guys!!!
pick an old vintage filmmaker
Oscar Micheaux
Alice B. Russell
James Wong Howe
Dorothy Arzner
Marion E. Wong
Gail Patrick
Tressie Strouders
Ida Lupino
Marie Bryant
Esther Eng
Noble Johnson
Maria P. Williams
Voting ended onAug 26, 2025
I'm putting little descriptions of everybody under the cut. This is just a sampling of the non-white-guy talent working in Hollywood behind the scenes—there were also numerous screenwriters, editors, craftspeople, camera operators, and other crew working through Hollywood, probably many whom we'll never know the names of. Let's celebrate them.
Oscar Micheaux is considered the first major Black filmmaker who produced, wrote, and directed both silent and sound features starring all-Black casts and crews.
Alice B. Russell was an actress who went onto produce and crew some of the movies of her husband Oscar Micheaux.
James Wong Howe was an Asian-American cinematographer and innovator who shot many iconic classic films, including The Thin Man, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Rose Tattoo, and Hud. He pioneered new cinematic techniques and had a prolific career despite significant racist discrimination.
Dorothy Arzner was an editor, writer, and director who worked consistently from the silent era through the 1940s. She was the first woman to join the DGA and is credited with the invention of the boom mic.
Marion E. Wong established the Mandarin Film Company in Hollywood in 1916, with herself as the principal writer, director, producer, and designer for her feature film The Curse of Quon Gwon. She went on to work as an entertainer, performing in Hollywood cabaret and vaudeville.
Gail Patrick transitioned from a career as a conventional Hollywood starlet to become one of the first white female Hollywood producers, starting her own production company and producing the Perry Mason television series.
Tressie Souders, along with Maria P. Williams, is credited as the first Black female director. She was likely kept from having a more prominent career by the racist standards of old Hollywood, but went on to become a film lecturer and teacher.
Ida Lupino was an actress but also a writer, director, and producer, and is credited as the first woman to direct a film noir. Through her independent film company she was able to create films focusing on issues mainstream Hollywood usually ignored including unplanned for pregnancy, bigamy, and rape.
Marie Bryant was a dancer, choreographer, and teacher, as well as the first Black dancer to be credited as "assistant dance director." She developed her own style of dancing called "controlled release" and is responsible for coaching Vera-Ellen in the style of dance that led to her success. She was also responsible for choreographing (or assisting on) the Betty Grable films Wabash Avenue and Meet Me After the Show. Gene Kelly used her as an assistant and described her as "one of the finest dancers I've ever seen in my life."
Esther Eng was a Chinese-American producer and director, and the first female director to direct Chinese-language films in Hollywood. I don't know much about her beyond her Wikipedia page, but she was an out lesbian if you too would like to have some sapphic emotions right now.
Noble Johnson was a producer and character actor, producing his own all-Black-cast films at his own studio, the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, while simultaneously appearing in mainstream white Hollywood productions such as King Kong, Moby Dick, and The Mummy.
Maria P. Williams was an activist and writer who co-founded the Western Film Producing Company and wrote and produced her own films before her untimely death.
Resources I found helpful for further reading:
The Dance-In and the Re/production of White Corporeality, by Anthea Kraut (specifically for Marie Bryant)
African American Women in the Silent Film Industry, by Kyna Morgan, Aimee Dixon
Asian Americans in the Silent Era (1894 to ca. 1930), Music of Asian America Research Center
After looking through this blog I think I’ve realised that this whole anti/proship discourse isn’t really about letting people do what they want or being anti censorship or cops vs sexually liberated queer perverts. The way I see it it’s “normies vs us” from the proship POV. A lot of them have spent their entire lives online and see anyone who isn’t as queer/weird/fandom-brained as them as a basic cishet normie, even if that person is queer themselves. It’s the ‘not like other girls’ of the internet. Trying to find pride in not following social norms. They think they’re being picked on for being the weird kid again. They’ve made fandom spaces into the toxic judgemental environment they’re used to. They’re scared of being labelled as cringe or gross again, so they force fandom spaces into going by THEIR rules and backhandedly bully anyone who isn’t ’in the know’.
I’m not saying this is inherently a bad thing and I’m not making fun of proshippers in this way. Just an observation.
How much of a shitty person do you have to be to fucking dress up as an ICE agent and threaten Hispanics / Latinos calling them illegals when you are DOING AN ILLEGAL THING . IMPERSONATION .
three weeks ago i began work on a little Eleventy-based website template for storing character information akin to Toyhou.se. it's been in a releasable state for about a week, but i've also been pushing updates to it near daily!
i also wrote up a quick tutorial for setting up the project on its download page, but i plan to improve it in the future.
click here to preview this template: NeoCities
click here to get the code: GitHub
features:
built-in "namespaces" for characters, locations, and stories, with their own page templates and information card formats
uses eleventy's tagging system to allow you to tag pages for fine categorization
a big focus on linking to other pages. each "creative" page lets you navigate between the previous/next item in the category. pages have a "linked pages" list that allow you to navigate to related pages, including "what links here"
a content filtering system allowing developers to hide/blur certain content from people who have not opted into it. optionally supports needing to click an "i am 18+" box before entering the site
lightbox images; clickable image links that can reveal metadata such as captions and artist credits
tabbed views allow you to view specific sections of content at a time, used in the various creative pages
SASS wrapper for optional better-formatted stylesheets. don't know how to use SASS syntax? SASS also supports regular CSS!
people are defending rapists and pedophiles and zoophiles out in the open. literally lying to people's faces, and when proof is shown that they are lying, people just plug their ears and call it fake, or worse, just shrug it off and continue being buddy buddy with offenders just because they like their art.
im so tired of it man. if people won't believe publicly available evidence that is still on the offenders' blogs/twitter, testaments from victims, and the offenders literally wishing death and pain on their victims publicly... i just dont know. it makes me feel like the internet is teeming with horrible people just chomping at the bit to silence victims.
tbh, this is why i overall encourage curation of your own community, and safeguarding of such. i have 0 tolerance for racists, for transphobes, for people who enforce rape culture when convenient. if you enable and allow certain types of people around you, even if they are "trying to be better", they are going to do nothing but take advantage of your good will. if one nazi feels comfortable at a bar, it is a nazi bar.
wis for example, had multiple people of color explaining to her that it was not her place as a european white woman to say if a mixed person is "really" nonwhite or not. wis continued to push and attempt to get these poc to agree with her, and when they did not, she accused them of being "gaslighters" and vagued about them even months later, despite not being mentioned at all by these people. her ego was genuinely so wounded by a poc telling her nicely to stop being racist, she had to comment to them months after the fact attempting to rewrite the situation, as if she were the victim.
So... I found this and now it keeps coming to mind. You hear about "life-changing writing advice" all the time and usually its really not—but honestly this is it man.
I love the lawyer metaphor, because whenever I see “John knew that...” in prose writing I immediately think “how? How does he know it?” Interrogate your witnesses. Cross-examine them. Make them explain their reasoning. It pays dividends.
