“A hurricane” ← Accurate. Will fight anything. Designs stuff like governments and economic systems for kicks. 25. They/Them. Send me all your hate mail.
I was talking to someone about Fury Road today and they said ‘I just hated how it had no plot. They just left and then turned around and went straight back, it was so stupid’ and I think my soul was in danger of leaving my body because really - that’s the whole point. That’s the great message of Mad Max Fury Road - they need to leave and go back because they need to understand that the Green Place doesn’t exist. Valhalla doesn’t exist. There’s no better place waiting, no Eden to escape to, nowhere for Furiosa and the wives to run to. This world, broken and damaged and war-torn as it is, is all they have, and if they want a Green Place then they have to make it themselves. They have to choose peace. They have to choose love for each other. They have to take the seeds from the older, violent generation and start again. They have to destroy the oppressive power structures holding them back, capitalism and the patriarchy that Immortan Joe represents.
The Green Place was around them all along, and it takes this long, cyclical journey to understand that, both for them and for the audience. The circular narrative structure is an absolute work of genius, and the fact that the entire plot can be boiled down to “they leave and come back” is an indication of how well this works as an action movie - that the plot is simple enough so everyone can understand what’s going on while explosions are going off and cars are racing past at 100mph - yet it’s still incredibly rich and wonderfully complex too.
And what a pertinent message to send out - the generations before us killed the world and now it’s up to us to fix what’s broken. There’s no Green Place but the one we make ourselves, which will be born out of fire and blood and rise from the ashes of the old world.
Medicine should never have been privatized in the first place. The concept of profiting off of human desperation and the need for life-saving medicine is, philosophically, intrinsically, and morally wrong both as a fundamental concept and in practice. The fact that Martin Shkreli was ever able to buy an AIDS drug and increase its price 5000% is indicative of a problem even bigger than a truly evil, despicable, and selfish human being; it is indicative of the problem of the current system of for-profit pharmaceuticals with obviously inadequate price regulation.
“Great, now fill out this questionnaire too. It’ll only take 20-30 minutes! If we decide not to hire you, we won’t even give you the courtesy of an automated email telling you you’re not the right fit!”
Unpopular opinion: straight people using “partner” to refer to their SO actually helps normalize the term so that lgbt folx can use it without automatically outing themselves to strangers. It also helps other straight ppl get comfortable with the fact that strangers aren’t entitled to information about other people’s gender or sexuality.
I hear ‘partner’ and think ‘gay’ too. A girl at work used it for months and I just went with it. When she would say ‘he’ I even thought maybe he was trans*. Anyways, someone using partner makes me more comfortable and I came out to her. She was just an intelligent straight girl that liked the term and was knowledgeable in human sexuality so definitely someone I should have felt comfortable coming out too. It’s a good sign of a straight person uses it IMO.
As a mental health clinician, this is actually my blanket term when discussing any romantic relationship. I agree it normalizes it, but I also think it’s a relatively safe term to use to describe most romantic relationships without making any assumptions about the person’s orientation or identity. I also use the word “partnered” when describing a monogamous relationship status.
The term “partner” also removes the implied hierarchy of boyfriend/girlfriend vs husband/wife. This is relevant both to non-monogamous people, and unmarried individuals for whom the importance of their relationship isn’t dictated by its legal status.
i hate to ruin everyone’s fun BUT you guys are so annoying. georgia o’keeffe very specifically stated how much she hated it when people, especially men, sexualized her art. male art critics pushed the interpretation of her artwork as sexual onto her and it upset her VERY deeply:
“When people read erotic symbols into my paintings they’re really talking about their own affairs,” O’Keeffe said. Still, the sexualized misconceptions of her work devastated her. “I almost wept,” she wrote of one review in 1921.
http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/59249/
now, because of some immature dudes in the art community, her work has been sexualized forever, and her paintings are now sexual objects. so like…making pussy jokes about her artwork isn’t just annoying, it’s disrespectful to everything she worked for, and it’s like rubbing her legacy in her face.
also “all of her paintings are like that” is just plain wrong. she did a series of extreme close ups of flowers (which is where these paintings come from) but that was just one series of paintings
she also loved painting landscapes, and was particularly inspired by desert landscapes in new mexico:
she also painted bones, particularly skulls. like flowers, she was inspired by the abstract shapes that bones make:
her artwork is extremely cool and she deserves to have a legacy other than “flowers”
Also, part of the reason people were so quick to interpret her work as sexualized pieces instead of the cutting edge explorations of color and abstraction they really were, was because of her relationship with photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who helped launch her career.
For Stieglitz and much of the male avant garde, eroticism was what set their work apart as ~edgy and exciting, and so O’Keeffe kinda got pigeon-holed by association. It’s a real testament to how a lack of diversity in the art world stifles artists’ own voices in regard to their own damn work.
I hear a lot of back and forth about STEM students vs Arts students but as someone who was a theatre major and then went into STEM I have to tell you there really is no reason they shouldn’t get along.
Being late for ballet and trying to get onto an elevator only to find it full nearly chest-deep with balloons and then the elevator goes to the next floor up and a girl gets on as an audience outside the elevator claps and the door closes and she says “you just walked into my absurdist installation art play” has an energy directly aligned with hearing the intern who recently accidentally made chlorine gas say “Dr. [man in charge of the lab] said we could just get rid of the extra liquid nitrogen by pouring it all on the floor and watching it disappear.”
Black Panther deserves to win the Oscar for best costume design based solely on the fact that it’s the only movie whose costumes haven’t been done and done and redone again. like i understand we all love the big poofy colorful fancy dresses of the 18th century but my god they’ve been done. Black Panther went above and beyond to incorporate various African tribes. Ms. Ruth E. Carter took her time envisioning designs based on a world untoucjed by colonizers, and the results are
beautiful
modern
colorful
and aid in the movie’s storytelling in a way the costume design of the other nominated movies simply does not.
again, Black Panther deserves to win the Oscar for Costume Design and Ms. Ruth E. Carter deserves so much praise for the beautiful masterpieces she created
me, an aged monarch lounging on my fur-strewn throne, gesturing for my servant to bring me my monacle: Bring them here! Bring them here, I say. Let me look at them.
guards: *drag the unwitting blog before me*
me, peering intently at the new blog and poking them with my scepter: Is this a real person? Hmm? What have you to say for yourself? What are your fandoms? Your interests? Speak up, these old ears aren’t what they used to be.
guards, tentatively: they do seem to be a real person, sire. We found them in possession of several memes and a fandom rant.
me, subsiding back into my sumptuous furs and waving them away: most extraordinary. It has been an age since there was a real person, but just as well, the dungeons have been overflowing with those tacky pornbots. This newcomer may remain in my domain. Make them welcome. And fetch me a quill! I feel a ficlet coming on…
When I explain cultural misappropriation to children, I use the example of The Nightmare Before Christmas.
It’s effective because especially for children, who don’t have enough historical context to understand much of the concept, you can still fully grasp the idea.
There was nothing wrong with Jack seeing the beauty and differences in Christmas town, it’s when he tried to take what is unique about Christmas town away from those it originally belonged to without understanding the full context of Christmas things is when everything went wrong.
When Jack tries to get the folk of Halloween town to make Christmas gifts for children, etc., children understand that the Halloween town folk do not have the full context for the objects they are making, and they are able to see that the direct repercussions and consequences are very harmful.
what i like about this is the implication that if jack had taken the time to understand christmas town, bringing christmas to halloween town would not have been harmful. that’s how it works, folks. cultural sharing is GOOD, it’s only misappropriation when it’s done in ignorance and disrespect.
There’s an interesting level here in that Jack tried to understand Christmas town. He could see the magic while he was there, and he did try to explain it that way to citizens of Halloween town. But they weren’t interested in the kind of life he was describing, so he started “rebranding” Christmas so that it was not like Christmas but was like Halloween. The people of Halloween town, never having actually encountered Christmas, have no way of knowing that what they’re being told about Christmas and “Sandy Claws” is inaccurate. Jack also tried to study Christmas and its culture, though he couldn’t quite get it; eventually, he literally decides to take it for himself, even as he knows it’s not really for him. He started out feeling sad the others in Halloween town didn’t ‘get it,’ but he then decided it’s not important to fully ‘get it’ but instead to have it.
So it’s not just accidentally removing things form their context; he has intentionally disregard the meaning of the rituals he purports to be recreating, making them more fun for the recreaters but not like what the rituals are supposed to be and without the related significance.
This is the best way to conceptualize the wrong way to share culture I have ever seen and I think I finally get where people are coming from when they talk about “cultural appropriation.”
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Libraries exist for the public. Amazon exists to maximize profits.
This past weekend, Forbes published and then took down a controversial article. “This article was outside of this contributor’s specific area of expertise, and has since been removed,” said Forbes, after significant backlash. The article in question? An op-ed arguing that libraries are a waste of taxpayer money and should be replaced by Amazon stores.
Libraries do seem to be outside of author Panos Mourdoukoutas’s areas of expertise; he’s a professor who specializes in world economy. (A popular tweet suggested that Mourdoukoutas paid for the privilege to be published on Forbes, though it turned out to be an error; he’s a paid blogger for Forbes.) But both the article itself and the backlash against it point to a profound anxiety centered on libraries and the question of whether they should be up for debate.
If we take it as read that public libraries exist and are good and important, then we’re saying that the services they provide are basic rights that it is our government’s responsibility to safeguard. If we suggest that libraries shouldn’t exist — that they’re a waste — then we call into question the rights that they protect.
Enter Mourdoukoutas’s now-deleted op-ed, whose central thrust was that the roles traditionally performed by libraries — lending books, of course, but also serving as community gathering places — are now performed better by “third places” like Starbucks and bookstore-cafes. And since Amazon’s brick-and-mortar bookstores are equipped with easy access to the comprehensive Amazon database of books around the world, the article concluded, Amazon bookstore-cafes are superior to libraries.
Many people might read this argument and protest, “But I must pay for books at Amazon! At a public library, I may borrow for free!” Mourdoukoutas had a comeback. “Let me clarify something,” he wrote on Twitter. “Local libraries aren’t free. Home owners must pay a local library tax. My bill is $495/year.”
It is true that libraries are partially funded by property tax dollars, in much the same way that taxpayers fund the other public services that we as a society have decided are vital to the public good, like schools and fire departments and parks and roadworks. I may not have children who attend school, but I still pay tax dollars toward the public school system, because we have agreed that when all children are educated, it’s good for the whole country.
What Mourdoukoutas was trying to debate was not whether libraries are “a good buy” (by and large they are, especially if you don’t have lots of very valuable property to pay taxes on), but whether making library services available to the public is good for the whole country. He was putting into question the library’s status as a public good.
Libraries are designed to serve the public. Amazon is designed to maximize its profits.
Libraries are funded by the public in order to serve the public. They offer books, movies, and music curated to entertain and inform the public, with more available through interlibrary loan. They offer internet access and low-cost printing services. They offer financial literacy training and job search assistance. They serve non-English-speaking immigrants. They serve incarcerated people and homeless people and housebound people.
Libraries do all of this because we as a society have decided that we should put our tax dollars toward a resource that offers the public education and entertainment, and that sees serving our most vulnerable populations as part of its mission. We have decided that doing so is part of the public good.
An Amazon bookstore-cafe is funded by an enormous corporation for the purpose of maximizing its profits. It is stocked with books selected by algorithms, with most of its stock made up of recent best-sellers and books that Amazon has been successful at selling online, along with various Amazon electronic devices. Educating the public is not Amazon’s priority. It is not designed to serve vulnerable populations. There is no reason it would be designed with that purpose in mind: Amazon is a business, not a public utility, and its only goal is to make money.
(Continue Reading)
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