Sparring Woodpecker

Clever (literate)

[panickedscribbles]

I think Leverage has a really neat take on the concept of revenge.

Because a lot of times, revenge gets framed as this inherently immoral act, like it doesn't matter how evil the person you want revenge on is, it doesn't matter that stopping them is a net positive for the world, revenge is just bad and wanting it makes you bad.

But I think that a lot of the problems with most revenge narratives come from the fact that the person/people seeking revenge put too much importance on getting revenge, but there's not enough catharsis in the actual act of taking revenge. They end up left with a whole lot of left-over righteous anger, and no acceptable targets left to vent it on. That way lies the bloodline ending feuds of greek tragedy and the like.

But Leverage says "No, actually you're right, that guy is absolutely terrible, he does need to be stopped and his victims should be awarded the catharsis of revenge." But then, instead of taking the easy way out of having Hardison siphon all the money out of their accounts, or sending Elliot over to their house with a baseball bat, they complicate the revenge plot. Instead of walking the easier path of the quick and unsatisfying revenge, they insist on poetic justice and dramatic irony and the complete and utter, very public destruction of the worst people in the world.

That's why I think Leverage feels different to, say, The Count of Monte Cristo, or other revenge-centric stories. They go the extra mile to tailor their revenge to the target, and give them Exactly what they deserve.

[captainlordauditor]

A crucial part to me is that in Leverage, while hurting and humiliating the person is a goal, it is never the only goal. When asked, a lot of the clients don't even ask for revenge; they ask for what they were promised, or what they lost. The kid they were trying to adopt. The farm that got foreclosed on. The patent rights to that gadget they invented.

And the Leverage crew delivers that (sometimes with a side platter of a big pile of money). People keep coming to them because they keep delivering on what was asked for.

Even the actual revenge isn't just for the catharsis of revenge, but to stop them from hurting more people. I can think of at least two episodes where they switch gears in the middle of a con because they realize that the best way to stop a mark from hurting more people isn't to humiliate them, it's to help them.

So that catharsis works. It feels like enough, because for once, it is. It's not just lashing out, it's part of an interconnected group of things that make it right.

[yb-cringe]

i feel like your group of close knit characters would work better less as a found family and more as a ride or die indie rock band a la lemonade mouth. “whos the mom friend” shut up. whos the bassist.

[tuxankhamun]

Trial by wombat

[asthedeathoflight]

When I was in high school we did an english unit on Octavia Butler and the teacher told us hey btw. You should call her "Butler" in your essays. Sometimes students call female writers by their first names unconsciously, but that's not acceptable. If you wouldnt call them William or Ernest you shouldn't call her Octavia.

And I was like cool whatever I was gonna call her Butler anyways. But that moment has stuck with me for my whole life because once you start seeing ppl calling women by their first names where men would be called by their last names you literally never stop seeing it.

[ironychan]

[rainbow-femme]

To update this, the astronaut didn’t actually do it, she and her wife were getting a divorce and the wife plead guilty to lying to the feds about it

And framing your ex for a crime mid-divorce while they are actively in space is some Agatha Christie level shit

[knights-unwelcommentary]

lesbians winning against 100% of all space false crime allegations

[unsolicited-opinions]

the merchant of venice is so weird bc like on the one hand it genuinely is extremely antisemitic but on the other hand it's got that one absolute BANGER monologue that is such an awesome (even if unintentionally so) condemnation of antisemitism that i as a jew enjoy so much despite...everything else about the play

The Merchant of Venice isn't ambiguous - it's 100% antisemitic, totally packed with Judenhass.

We perceive that monologue with dissonance because the world has changed since it was written.

When Shakespeare wrote "Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions?" his audience heard a villain justifying his revenge.

The speech was meant to make Shylock more threatening. Look, Shakespeare shows us, he can reason like us, he knows what he's doing is wrong, and he's choosing cruelty anyway.

The humanity Shylock displays...makes the villainy worse.

We, however, don't hear it that way.

We hear a persecuted man asserting his dignity. The exact same words that made Elizabethans recoil in moral horror make us want to stand up and cheer.

Shakespeare didn't accidentally create tension between structure and character- the cultural ground shifted beneath the text since it was written.

What his audience processed as escalation ("this villain is rational enough to know better") we process as justification: "this man has every right to be angry."

The rest of the play holds up exactly as intended. The Christians are still the heroes. Shylock's forced conversion is still framed as justice and his exit is the necessary expulsion that allows harmony to return, so the romantic comedy structure resolves exactly as intended.

Only that one speech doesn't work as intended with modern audiences because It crossed centuries intact and landed in a world with a different moral architecture. We can't hear it the way it was written. The words are too clear, too irrefutable. They make claims about human equality that Shakespeare's audience could comfortably reject, but which we now hold as inviolable, axiomatic truths.

So what's written as a villain speech sounds to us like a hero speech...and the happy ending feels like an atrocity...because it is.

[jewishmuppet]

Obligatory Dara Horn, because once you hear the muahahaha in his monologue, you can't unhear it:

[pargolettasworld]

And for all of that, Shylock is not just one of Shakespeare's more human villains, he's also one of the most human Stage Jews™ written in that era. Shakespeare died forty years before Cromwell re-admitted Jews to England, and most English people of Shakespeare's time had never actually met a Jew. Stage Jews™ of the time tended to be one-dimensional cartoon-character Bad Guys. Shylock was a great step forward, since he was, you know, actually a person. An Evil Jew™, mind you, but a real-human-person Evil Jew™, with motivations and family and a life just like an actual human might have.

Which is in part to say . . . if Shylock is the best, most well-rounded, most humane portrayal of a Jewish character that any Elizabethan playwright could come up with, things were dire indeed.

[saint-batrick]

do y'all even know how much i hate being an "elder queer" at 40? a whole goddamn generation before me was wiped out by a plague that politicians deemed not their problem bc it was killing the "right" people. like. this was OPENLY STATED. i spent a large chunk of my childhood going to funerals. nevermind the fact that killing queer people for being queer wasn't codified into law as a hate crime until i was a junior in high school.

i should NOT be an elder queer, i should be middle at most. i am a middle aged queer. most of the elder queers died.

when i was growing up i didn't go to pride parades, i went to pride marches. because that's 100% what they were in the 80s and 90s.

from the absolute bottom of my heart, LEARN OUR FUCKING HISTORY. a generation was nearly wiped out so you young queers could be here. don't let that have been in vain, please.

[saint-batrick]

the fact that people have reblogged this and tagged it "q slur" makes me want to eat glass.

[mybigfatgaylife]

We’re not all gone. Some of us survived. Those funerals OP went to as a child? My friends and I were the ones arranging them.

I was always kind of grateful that the marches slowly became parades. That the protests slowly gave way to parties. It was progress, it was healing.

I was grateful for that because I never healed.

I’m still remembering how straight society turned their collective backs on us and let us die. I will never forgive or forget that. Maybe that’s a shortcoming on my part but it’s true. I’ve tried and I can’t. That scar runs too deep.

And now we’re back to the same shit again. Straight society is turning their backs on my trans brothers and sisters. Ignoring their pain. Trying to legislate them out of existence.

Even our so-called allies are saying shit like “well if we want to appeal to a broader base we can’t keep going on about the transgender thing.” Fuck you Gavin Newsom. In particular.

Make no mistake: they want us dead. Not just closeted, not just silent. Gone. Non-existent. And I say us because they’re just starting with the trans people. They’ll come after the rest of us if they succeed.

I am old and so, so tired.

But I’m alive. And I’m not going anywhere.

[ladyshinga]

For anyone who hasn't heard, the OP here, @saint-batrick, passed away about a year and a half ago. So yeah, please... love the queers that are still here, still alive. Love us while we're all still here, and learn why so many aren't.

[dogrose-sprout]

i want to share some non-american context about aids pandemic

AIDS is often talked about as an event that changed queer history, and sometimes I see people frustrated about how cruel it was to think that aids is "God's punishment" for gays. It could be different if society was not that homophobic.

It's interesting that if you compare it to the situation with aids in USSR, you can see the issue was also in USA medicine + social stratification where middle class+ people saw themselves as kinda *biologically* separated from others.

The USSR had aids pandemic started at the same time, and at first the government was trying to tell that soviet people are safe from the "capitalistic disease of gays, addicts and sex workers" (the language was much more dehumanizing, I just don't want to use it). And you know what? Soviet people did not believe it. They were scared as fuck, especially when the knowledge spread and they saw the first results of misinformation and secrecy around AIDS.

The propaganda did not work because people knew the medicine is the same for everyone in the country but the most powerful politicians. Soviet citizens had no control over if they will receive the donor blood of an ill person or the injection from the same reusable syringe as aids+ gay or whoever. There was not enough medical equipment, it was not sterilized properly, and nobody was protected. You could behave as the most "dignified" person ever, to remain celibate and stay out of drug usage, but if you need a vaccination, got hurt at work or have diabetes, you are damned. Every visit to the hospital was a risk. It's the matter of accident if you catch aids in the hospital or not.

It was evident in practice. Because children were first to suffer of aids. Many of them.

The first victims of the aids pandemic in the USSR were an adult man and a 12 yo girl. Almost 10 years later there was an outbreak in the children's hospital in the Asian republic, Kalmykiya, and a lot of really young children got ill. I mean newborn babies and toddlers. They had no chance to misbehave to deserve a punishment, you know.

AIDS pandemic was one of the minor reasons why the USSR collapsed. It was obvious that this government could not protect its people. It tried to use the queerphobic rhetoric borrowed abroad, and it led to the bad stuff, not only for gay people, but for every part of society. And if for the USA the homophobic negligence was at least based on reality - homosexual men were the first victims indeed, - for the USSR it was total fantasy!

There were a couple of gays and bisexual men who brought aids from abroad and were diagnosed because they confirmed the homosexual contact somewhere. But there were foreign students, who formed partnerships and families with Soviet people; there were tourists, children of aids+ parents who had no idea about aids at all, sailors working in Africa and having contacts with locals and etc. Putting the blame on gays did not work because officially the soviet union had no gays! And even when they caught some, it did not look credible.

The history went wrong and now it's forgotten that soviet gays had nothing to do with aids. The tale of gays bringing aids was told so many times that it started to seem the only one. Ehhhh, it's not that simple.

And usa was the origin of this tale, which is upsetting. May be for you the aids pandemic is mostly in the past, but oh boy it's getting only worse for post-ussr space and homophobia rises

My source is the book "Вспышка", Ирина Ролдугина, Катерина Суверина

[zhenya-grey]

@brightlotusmoon a perspective of AIDS from the USSR side.

[brightlotusmoon]

I am hugging everybody.

[arctic-hands]

When I was a teenager and still on Neopets I was part of a pretty big Star Trek guild and eventually became part of its council, with the solemn duty of creating weekly polls. Well one day I created the poll "Which would win in a fight? Borg Cube or Death Star?". Naturally, since this was a Star Trek guild, the answer was overwhelmingly "Borg Cube", but someone did have the rationality to point out we were biased.

So I look up a pretty prominent Star Wars guild and message one of their council and ask them to poll the same question and get back to me in a week. They do, and naturally the fuckin geeks said "Death Star".

So then I look up a Stargate guild and messaged the lead council member, saying the same thing, and they get back to me almost immediately saying that the Death Star would immediately one-shot a Borg Cube but they would never be able to do it again to another Cube. And I took that wisdom back to my guild and we were mollified, and for one moment the Nerd World was peaceful.

[evilsoup]

[gilliagandy]

Truly thrilled to finally find this post on my dash.

[crow--teeth]

my friend who is training to be a 911 operator just told me that they are having to restrain themself whenever responding to training calls from saying “that’s illegal people can’t do that” and I find that so fucking funny

[crow--teeth]

For context

[striders]

the other day i saw a tiktok of a woman talking about how her hyper-militant abusive parents would sometimes punish her by “taking away her name” and referring to her as a prisoner number. genuinely terrible stuff, obviously. but i skimmed the comments and. listen. i truly DO NOT mean to dunk too hard on this person, like they could be a kid or something, but.

just. breathtaking. imagine if your primary reference for the concept of the un-personing of prisoners was (check notes) a book series about owls.

[saleensundria9]

This is why it's important to Include stuff like this in fiction, especially ya fiction. It can be a lot of sheltered and/or indoctrinated children, in the case of a lot of rural "Christians", first introduction to these types of concepts in a way they can understand.

I don't think there's anything weird or shameful about it. Knowledge is knowledge, regardless of where it came from.

[a-polite-melody]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

I was once listening to one of the ten billion animorphs podcasts out there, with two hosts, one who'd read Animorphs as a kid and one who was reading it for the first time as an adult. For those who don't know, Animorphs is a war story in which a handful of children have to secretly hold off an alien invasion until the "good" aliens arrive to save Earth. It starts off with fairly clear-cut Bad Species of aliens and Good Species of aliens but as the series goes on it becomes clear that there is no such thing as a good, clean or glorious war, that a clean Good Side and a clean Bad Side is usually propoganda, that heroism is a matter of circumstance and that war will chew up and spit out even the victorious; there are no winners in war, just the side that lost less.

It's a lot, for books aimed at eleven year olds who want to read about kids turning into fun animals.

On the podcast, the two (American) hosts happened to get onto the topic of the post-9/11 Iraq War and their reactions to it. They were both children at the time and as such could not be expected to have particularly nuanced views of US military policy. The person who hadn't read Animorphs was unsurprised by the declaration of war; that's what you did. Someone attacks America, America goes to war. That's how a country protects itself, through military revenge. The Animorphs fan, about the same age, had been devastated and against the war from the start. War was a Big Deal and, while sometimes unavoidable, should be a last resort; a lot of people were going to die, and a lot more were going to get hurt, and no matter how the war shook out it was still going to be horrible. They attributed this perspective, of course, to the series that had taught them about the horrors endemic to war in an engaging way at such a young age -- to Animorphs.

That's what kid fiction is for.

[nikniknikin]

I was the target audience when Avatar: The Last Airbender was airing in and around 2008. I met real ass highschoolers who were so sheltered and controlled by their parents and churches that did not know 'refugee' or 'immigrant' was anything but a dirty word for criminal creeps until Avatar had a multi episode arc about refugees trying to get into Ba Sing Se. In that political climate, for those kids, there was no discussion of WHY people were trying to cross a border in the first place and then this kids show aired on prime time nickolodeon that said yeah the people enforcing the strict and complicated immigration protocols are the bad guys. Aang is going to help smuggle a family into a city across a big fucking wall, because he is a hero and that is the right thing to do. People deserve to be safe.

That was the crack in the damn for more than one kid I knew to start questioning their conservative upbringing and pushing back against that agenda. When someone is drowning in conservative propaganda you cannot shame them for whatever they cling to as their first life raft.

[rhube]

A wild ride:

This author has chosen to make their posts visible only to people who are signed in.

(I'm sorry, I don't have the spoons to alt-text all that, but if anyone wants to add in a reblog, have at.)

[reverbraven]

[talvin-muircastle]

Errant bus driver takes passengers for unwanted ride to Vienna Metro station | FFXnow

A routine bus trip from New York City to D.C. took a harrowing turn for passengers last night (Monday) when the driver reportedly decided to

[sparringwoodpecker]

Fuck undue hesitation. That shouldn't be a serious fault. You want me to drive safely? If I approach a junction, especially an unfamiliar one thank you very much for changing the test routes to a completely new part of town, then I will take my damn time assessing the situation. Everyone always says its better to take your time and get there safely than to go to fast and not get there at all, well that can be true of the cars behind me too. Sure, have it as a minor, maybe if I'm taking a long break at every single junction it can level up to serious but right off the bat as a serious, nah mate. Cut the waiting times down by not failing us for stupid shit.

[currentlycryingaboutlancelot]

beatrice from much ado would make such a good medieval damsel one meets on a quest. beautiful and lovely. quite witty. the only thing she asks of you is you immediately commit for her an act of extreme violence

[sweetcardamom]

Ah, the simple joys of maidenhood!

[knightwithakay]

my montante instructor came by during longsword class last night and was like “hey. I found a guy to make me a flaming greatsword. If I did would you be interested.”

OBVIOUSLY I WOULD BE EXTREMELY INTERESTED IN A GIANT SWORD THAT IS ON FIRE, CHRIS

[knightwithakay]

update

I have never met a man more dedicated to becoming a dark souls boss.

[mothecho]

They should invent a way to sit hunched over doing crafts that is Good for your body

[thatdisasterauthor]

I saw something recently that surgeons use to support their heads during long procedures, and apparently it takes about 30lbs of pressure off your neck. I want one for crafting so bad.

[nogendermoretrees]

That sounds amazing. Do you remember what it's called? I ran a couple searches but only found supports for people receiving head surgery, not the surgeons themselves.

[thatdisasterauthor]

I found it! It's this thing: https://nekspine.com/

It obviously wouldn't be as fancy or perfect, but I feel like this wouldn't be too hard to make yourself? That spine piece is carbon fiber for some level of flexibility, and based on its shape I feel like you could pretty easily modify a cheap kids archery bow to serve the same function. Then you'd just need the vest to mount it to and a headpiece.

[waterandsilver]

crazy how the printer is the only piece of tech that acts up like that almost every day of its life. and we just accept it

[waterandsilver]

i don't think i've ever met a printer that actually wanted to be a printer. i think most printers have dreams of being on the stage

[injuries-in-dust]

Watch to the end...

The joy when he did it!