floating freely on the tides of hyperfixation

you get what you get

[sherlock-on-a-case]

Oops I got motivated

Some self indulgent nonsense

I love this show

I've never made a video that wasn't a school project

[batmanlesbian]

can't believe lindsey graham died the day after vivian wilson said this about him

[rosenkav-art]

Chicago (2002) was almost perfect but they forgot to have these two kiss

[annabelle--cane]

yknow I'm feeling a bit brave so I will venture to say what this blighted essay's pitch actually is: reading project hail mary (novel and film) as a ravishment fantasy. in both main threads of the narrative grace is brought wildly out of his element and pulled into the orbit of a mysterious foreign stranger who is significantly stronger / richer / more powerful than him, forced to accept unsolicited lavish gifts and personal praise despite protests and discomfort, and made to live in isolated locations in extremely close proximity to these people with no say in the matter, all of which are common motifs in ravishment fantasies. on her own, stratt also brings in other common motifs of restraints, drugging, being above the law, multiple kidnappings (I'm doing crazy things with the classical definition of "rape" as in "abduction" and its shared etymology with "rapture" as in "being taken to the heavens"), and the very specific yet still common motif of "otherwise trustworthy partner goes too far and doesn't take 'no' for an answer." rocky on his own brings in the overprotective flavor common to a lot of dark romance novel heroes, i.e. "I make sure you sleep and I like to watch you while you do it, I make sure you eat enough even if you've got baggage about it, I make inhuman displays of strength when you're injured, and as long as I'm around I'll make sure nothing bad ever happens to you ever again."

the issue I was running into with researching this a few weeks ago is that almost all of the scholarly writing on the content of people's forced-sex fantasies focuses solely on women's fantasies and starts with the research question of "why would women enjoy imagining such a horrible misogynistic thing?" despite surveys often showing that men have force-fantasies (where they are the one being forced) at very comparable rates to women. my hypothesis for a bit was "either men's fantasies are exactly the same as women's or they're completely different in [x] way," which was disproven interestingly when I did finally find something about men's force-fantasies: in content they are almost exactly the same as women's fantasies but the emotional motivations are often different in [y] way, which I hadn't expected. and [y] also super applies to my buddy ryland, perhaps even more than my original [x] hypothesis.

my hopes for writing this are twofold: a) to address the question I sometimes see phm audience members come away with of "if grace likes his life by the end and doesn't seem that mad about all of that, is the message supposed to be 'violation of bodily autonomy is good, actually?'", and b) to lightly resist one of the prevailing notions in the study of forced-sex fantasies, that ravishment fantasies are solely abstracted and fantastical and pleasurable and are completely 100% separate from fearful paranoid imaginings of / flashbacks to realistic sexual violence.

[annabelle--cane]

oh also: the most common interpretation of why people have ravishment fantasies is that it allows the fantasist to disavow a desire they feel ashamed of because, in the fiction of the forcing, they don't *want* it at all, they're being made to do whatever it is and can't be considered at fault. as I allude to in my final paragraph of the original post, I think it's a tad more nuanced, but there's definitely a lot of truth to that. grace can tell stratt that he's not smart or important or capable or brave or selfless enough to do what she wants, but she'll ignore it, make him do it anyway, and kit him out with skilled staff members and expensive lab equipment and coffee just the way he likes it. it's a fantasy of being respected and heroic and good whether he likes it or not.

with rocky, the fantasy is of being forced to be loved and protected. rocky decides to initiate contact, he decides that he's moving into the hail mary, he decides that he's always going to watch grace sleep even if grace says he doesn't need it, he decides to gift grace the fuel to get home even when grace pretends he doesn't want it, and he decides he's not going to let grace die to save him even when grace says he's made his choice. the two scenarios allow grace to experience the rewards of being selfless without needing to be so gauche as to ever say he thinks he's that good of a person AND to experience the rewards of being selfish without saying he thinks he deserves to be cared for.

[faeri-sami]

Just a silly crossover that wouldn't leave my mind

[demilypyro]

girl I know took me to a local squatter hangout today, where a lot of local activism organises from. an old movie theater. thing is, I already knew the building like the back of my hand. i used to go there all the time as a kid. it was one of my standard places to go after school. it closed some time around covid and never reopened. it was strange, seeing it in this new state after so many years. every wall was covered in political graffiti. the city cut the building's power so most of the lights were off, though some had been connected to a generator. instead of selling tickets and popcorn, the lobby was being used to hand out food and old clothes. one of the screening rooms had been turned into a dance hall. another had random artworks and furniture laying around.

.... I loved every second I spent there. I hate stagnancy. I love that it changed so much. I love that they saw this old building, this thing I used to love as a child, and turned it into something good, that I can love now. I love that there are so many people who care so deeply about these causes, so close by, in my own city.

[floweringferns]

Christine Baranski's version of Does Your Mother Know in Mamma Mia! (2008) rb if you agree

[vargamornight]

in case you have not been utterly blessed by the presence of christine baranski

[sherlock-on-a-case]

Back on my YouTube bullshit and bullshitter than ever

[sherlock-on-a-case]

Grace and Rocky trying to spice up the taumoeba on the long trip to erid with a well stocked lab

[closet-keys]

when thinking about how oppression works, on a structural level, my guiding principle is that I must spend at least as much time looking down as I do looking up.

what do I mean by this? here's an example. when my surgery is delayed multiple times, I spend a little time looking up (there is only one surgeon in the entire area who will perform this surgery on trans people, so every trans person's surgical timeline is bottle-necked and delayed by months every time he goes to a conference or takes a vacation or experiences an injury. in other words, if I was cis, I would not encounter this difficulty in accessing surgery). and then I spend time looking down (due to nonstop harassment and legal threats, this practice now only treats adults and will no longer perform surgeries on minors. in other words, my access to surgery is predicated on adult privilege I have at the direct expense of trans youth's lack of access).

if you do not build a habit around thinking in this way, you will become the person Audre Lorde describes as "so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman's face." If we are seeking to dismantle structures of oppression, rather than to simply use and climb them, then we absolutely must make a practice of looking in both directions, especially when we feel like we're on the bottom.

[tribblefarmer]

The Artemis II images are making me emotional for a lot of reasons but one of them is:

[battlecrazed-axe-mage]

So we're all gonna let the new Harry Potter show die on the vine, right? No hatewatching. No thinkpieces. No videos about how bad it is. Deprive it of oxygen and let it wither away unremarked-upon and unprofitable; make HBO lose their entire investment and prove to the corporate entertainment sphere that the entire IP is poison. And spend that time doing something that brings you joy instead.

[joy-and-whimsy-official]

Official joy and whimsy post

[sherlock-on-a-case]

HBO won with heated rivalry, make them lose with this

[danandphilupdates]

danandphil tiktok

18/3/26

[sherlock-on-a-case]

Did they put 'so this is love' as the audio?🫣

[sherlock-on-a-case]

Sam Gamgee bringing up Rosie Cotton after the ring is destroyed is so 'I could marry svetlana' coded

But they go with sure, marry her, but we're still living together

[marimbles]

underrated tumblr feature is being able to catch up to yourself on your dash. so there is an END POINT. and you can say “ah, I have reached where I left off, there is no more to see! I’ll take my leave now and come back later when there are new posts.” instead of being stuck forever in a bottomless algorithm pit digging deeper and deeper till you have to summon monumental strength to climb out

[depsidase]

[megpie71]

As a former humanities student, I feel it is my duty to reblog this one.

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

‘Heroic actions are a natural tendency’: why bystander apathy is a myth

Modern research shows the public work together selflessly in an emergency, motivated by a strong impulse to help

“The notion that people panic and run screaming for the exits is a Hollywood fiction,” said Prof Stephen Reicher, an expert in group behaviour at the University of St Andrews.

“Characteristically, people stay and help each other,” he said. “We found this during the 7/7 attacks on the underground and the 1999 attack on the Admiral Duncan pub in London, where people looked after each other even though they feared other bombs.

“In our own research on the Leytonstone tube attack in 2015, there was an amazing level of spontaneous coordination by bystanders: some directed others away from danger. Some distracted the attacker. Some confronted the attacker. Each was able to act because of the others. Heroism was a feature of the group, not just the individual,” he added.

Prof Clifford Stott, a specialist in the psychology of crowds and group identity at Keele University, agreed. Modern research, he said, showed “bystander apathy” was a myth. Instead, strangers often work together in emergency situations with highly sophisticated unity.”

[cephalopodvictorious]

Bystander apathy is a myth invented by the New York Times to cover up that the police were called by several residents of the building, but the cops refused to act. The cops then told the Times that 38 people just watched her die (a seemingly arbitrary number and a physical impossibility based on where the attacks occurred), and the Times ran with it. In fact, Kitty was alive when the cops got there, and was being held and comforted by one of her friends who lived in the building because one of the people who saw her get attacked from across the street called her friend to go get her. Because people care.

The Bystander Effect Started from a Lie

You have just been attacked. How likely is it that someone will come to your help? If you remember the infamous case of Kitty Genovese in 19

[moosepower]

I will always re-blog this. The story of Kitty Genovese’s murder has gone down in history as a story about everyone watching it happen and doing nothing and none of the story is true.

[elodieunderglass]

I get motion sick and become interestingly pale. On an overcrowded commuter train to London, standing in the overheated toilet-and-bicycle corridor between carriages, I started to feel particularly unwell, and politely asked to swap places with people standing near the doors. There was just some combination of factors that was especially unpleasant.

When the train disembarked, in a long stream of people marching purposefully across the station in the usual commuter way, I decided to pull out of the main traffic and lean against a railing to recover a bit, being interestingly pale. I'm a very competent and cool person, a long way out from my first rodeo. I certainly am FASCINATINGLY pale when ill, and am attractive in my way for strangers to look at twice, but I hadn't thought it was to the extent of the attention I received.

Over the course of pulling myself together, five people departing from the train, of a huge diversity of backgrounds, came over and spoke to me. A woman offered me water. Another offered to stay with me. A brisk woman with a wheelie-case, a healthcare-professional's confidence and an unreadable but trustworthy-looking lanyard, politely but firmly took my pulse. I guess I looked that green.

A magnificent elderly tweedy gentleman, about 200 years old, had a whole instinctive flowchart of time-honed chivalric suggestions: escort to bench? provide arm for support? provide mint from 200-year-old tin? summon train staff to the lady's side? PROVIDE HANDKERCHIEF? He bowed majestically when I declined his assistance, but I rather wished I had needed his help for something. He had such a splendid bearing, and locked-in programme! He didn't even need to second-guess himself or make any new decisions! There was no overlay of social anxiety; it was utterly part of his molecular framework! IF Ladylike Object IS Deathly Pale, THEN: give > mint!

(There's the caveat that immediately-obvious public transport crises and other mid-range disasters, as outlined in the OP, are a prime example of when people living in the UK tend become more organised in a crisis, not less. It isn't a great place to get case studies since a lot of people living in the UK are quietly holding themselves in readiness for the day when they can participate in being a Collective Hero of Public Transport.)

But as nobody needed to help this particular bystander, it was a bit affirming. Hey: imagine if I was dying in the middle of the London commuter rush. I bet Old Guy would have my back. I wouldn't expect him to fight off an attacker - but he'd certainly have a little mint to ease my passage.