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allthingswhumpyandangsty

obriensource

Dylan O’Brien at a screening of "The Outfit" at The Whitby Hotel in New York (March 9, 2022)

ljspencerauthor

Take it from the biochemist who used to work with vaccines:

1. Some vaccines will keep you from getting sick: measles, mumps, rubella, etc.

2. Some vaccines won't keep you from getting sick, but it will keep you from dying: COVID, flu, etc.

3. Some people can't get vaccines, or vaccines don't work for them. They are a tiny percentage of the population.

4. Side effects from vaccines are normal.

5. mRNA vaccine technology has been around for 20 years. It's not *that* new.

6. Vaccine cards have been around for a very long time. You'd know that if you traveled to certain countries, or looked it up on Google.

7. I'm getting tired of saying all this stuff to people. At this point, I don't give a flying fuck what you believe, grow the fuck up and just get your fucking vaccine and/or booster shot. But if you insist on being a selfish asshole, stay the fuck away from me.

athena-noctua-bubo

#7 My sentiments exactly. .

disneydailly

marrymejasonsegel

I wrote a college paper once about gender dynamics in Disney films, and part dealt with the emphasis of androgyny in this film. Mulan is an outsider and unsure of her position of the world when she is adhering to both a total feminine role (the matchmaking scene) and a total masculine role (disguised as a male soldier) and it’s only when she’s able to embrace both sides that she is able to fully showcase her abilities and ultimately save the day.

The entire climax, from climbing the poles using sashes, counting on Shan Yu’s complete dismissal of women to get the Emperor to safety, to this scene where she literally uses a symbol of womanhood (within the movie at least) to disarm the villain of his symbol of masculinity and beat him at his own game, shows Mulan relying on the aspects of her femininity that she has grown up adhering to and adapting the tactical knowledge and fighting skills that she learned disguised as a male soldier to those aspects. The result is a unique and innovative view of the world and her course of action that leads her to save the day when the male soldiers failed and the women wouldn’t even have been allowed to try.

ingu

This commentary is so curious to me because it’s such an excellent example of white/western cultural bias in portrayals of other cultures. Because fans by themselves are a gender neutral object in Ancient China, especially the large type that Mulan uses in this particular scene is actually masculine if you must code it historically, and in Chinese hands would be used as a tool to support her masculinity and not the other way around. These paper fans are used in general by (male) scholars and artists who decorate its surface with art and calligraphy. It is a symbol of (masculine) intellectual power and the intellectual elite. And if you look to Asian martial arts films, they are a common and almost exclusive weapon of men.

Yet the movie takes this deeply cultural object and either willingly or ignorantly makes it an object of womanhood or femininity. To the extent of my knowledge, this is mostly reflective of western social history. And draws from the coquettish ways Georgian? Ladies would use the fan to signal their romantic interest and all the history and influence around it. The equivalent object for the Chinese lady would in fact be the handkerchief, or a hairstick if you want something pointy.

And it’s all the more curious because at the end of the day it’s a western depiction of a foreign story made for western consumption. It is not a story made by and for Chinese little girls, but to empower and inspire those in the West. Which provides the context for the above (excellent) analysis. It does not need to fully take Chinese history into context because it was never made for us, despite being explicitly about us.

hayatims-deactivated20240111

Nature in Florida is so weird??

I was out hiking where the trail ran alongside this river that was moving pretty fast, but a couple miles in it just disappeared.

The river was gone. It just stopped, like someone had snipped it in half and taken away the rest.

So I stopped and stared at it a while, trying to figure out what the heck was going on, because the water was flowing very rapidly, but the river had abruptly ended.

Finally, this old man in a pair of worn overalls stopped next to me to watch as well, before leaning over and asking

“First time seein’ it?”

I responded “yes”, and he continued:

“It goes underground here, pops back up some three miles west. Not the best swimmin’ spot, for obvious reasons, though that don’t stop people from tryin’.”

So I asked him what he meant and he said,

“Lots of dumb folk with no regard for God’s nature die out here every year. Scientists, usually.”

We talked a little more and eventually went our separate ways, but when I got home I decided to look in to what happens to the river when it plunges underground like that.

It turns out it submerges and travels through a complex cave system for a few miles, and millions of gallons of pressurized water travels through there each day.

It gets cooler though!

Apparently, when water levels were low enough during a drought, researchers were able to send divers and probes through the cave system and found both animal and human remains, some of which included mastodons, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats and more. The human remains date back to about 7500 BC.

Anyway, Florida is weird and we have deadly underground rivers filled with cool prehistoric animals I guess.