#done badly

[goingrampant]

There's a protest that's anti-Trump but that I mistakenly thought was a group of Nazis for a moment. They have a repetitive motion machine similar to something outside a car lot that looks like a guy in a suit Nazi saluting. It's supposed to be Elon Musk with the idea to remind people about a bad thing done at Trump's inauguration. At the end of the day, though, it's a Nazi salute machine set up on a street corner. Do people think about how that looks???

[period-dramallama]

I'm still not watching the Serpent queen, but apparently there's wlw representation? Which I'm pleased about. About time!

[mikovision]

Visit Original Link

[thoughtlessarse]

We Need to Modify—Not Trash—Oregon’s Trailblazing Drug Decriminalization Law

Measure 110 made Oregon the first in country to decriminalize all drugs. The law was poorly implemented and should be changed, not discarded

As 2023 winds down, perhaps the West Coast’s most innovative—and controversial—public policy experiment is on life support. Three years ago, amid the public health crisis of the pandemic and increases in drug usage, Oregon voters passed Ballot Measure 110, the Drug Addiction Treatment and Recovery Act, with 58 percent voting in favor. The law decriminalized personal possession of all categories of drugs, making the state the first in the country to remove law enforcement from the equation around hard drug usage. Advocates argued that it would free up money for treatment and social-service interventions—the measure allocated upwards of $260 million from tax revenues on legal marijuana to treatment and addiction services—and would end the criminalization of poor, disproportionately minority residents. It was sold as a win-win for commonsense criminal-justice reform and, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the protests that grew out of that horrific event, as a step forward for racial justice. The results didn’t quite work out the way proponents had hoped. In the last three years, the number of fatal drug overdoses in Portland soared. In 2021, alone, 41 percent more Oregonians died of fatal fentanyl overdoses than died in 2020. The steep upward trajectory continued over the succeeding two years as well. In 2023, nearly one in every 500 visits to emergency rooms and urgent care centers in the state were due to opioid overdoses, almost double the rate in 2019.

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That'll happen when you don't have the support infrastructure in place.

[aralintheobsessive]

So I turn off my adblocker on YouTube because I want to support the small creators I watch, but the ad algorithm has no idea what to do with me, which can result in hilarious misfires. Just now it was showing me an ad for pre-natal vitamins. I’m 18 days post-hysterectomy.

[kelcipher]

'Patients Will Die': One County's Challenge To Trump's 'Conscience Rights' Rule

California's Santa Clara County argues that if the rule goes into effect in July, the county will suffer irreparable harm in terms of patien

[oneiriad]

alyeskandragon replied to your post “I watched Bright, which I had been looking forward to since the first...”

Wait. What? I want to watch the movie you watched because mine called out the senseless LAPD violence (they are notoriously the most corrupt police force), had a biracial couple (that Will Smith has been wanting since Hitch) and incorporated (seamlessly, i might add) many different cultures and told us all that we're assholes.

I must admit, I’m slightly puzzled, because, well - none of your points actually address or refute any of the things I talked about in my post.

Yes, the movie shows police violence - but, apart from a couple of comments, like the “fairy lives don’t matter” one, it just felt - for this Dane - like a pretty standard Hollywood gritty cop drama level of violence, apart from the shiny magic. It has a biracial couple - well, yes? Not that Ward’s wife is particularly prominently featured, but yes. So does Sense8, The Flash, LoT - sorry, my current American media consumption does not leave me finding that weird? And it incorporated many different human ethnicities and cultures, yes.

It’s still crappy urban fantasy world building.

See, the Orcs? They are shown to be pretty much monocultural, which makes no sense. We get references to them being in Russia, so that’s at least two-three continents that species is spread over. They should have many different cultures. Many. How did they even come to the US? Did the immigrate, where they always there? And the Elves - another monocultural species, apart from a tiny, secret minority of Dark Lord worshipers.

The thing I am unimpressed with is that this movie, Bright? It takes a buddy cop movie dealing with racism and a plot involving a macguffin, and it scatters a bunch of high fantasy species and tropes across it, without any proper worldbuilding to support it. It’s like - every reference in this movie is for a world like ours, exactly like ours - our history, our cultural products. It references Shrek, it references Alamo. Except not, because on top of all the real world history, we are supposed to accept a narrative involving multiple sentient species co-existing on this planet and a Dark Lord getting defeated 2000 years ago. But apart from that, everything is exactly the same.

There is a freaking dragon flying the skies above LA and I am supposed to imagine a world where anybody would make the movie Shrek?

It’s sloppy, lazy, crappy world-building, of the sort you get, when urban fantasy gets reduced to a metaphor for real world social issues. Exactly like you get sloppy, lazy, crappy world building, when high fantasy gets reduced to something that needs be psychoanalyzed.

And it’s probably because of the very points you find so important that the urban fantasy of this movie is done so badly. Because the movie makers have prioritized the metaphor over the world building. Because frankly? Making urban fantasy all about being a metaphor for RL issues? Bad idea. You end up with True Blood, where “oh, the vampires are a metaphor for LGBT+ people getting persecuted by religious fanatics”, which works right until you realize that the majority of said vampires are mass murderers. You end up with Being Human, where the werewolf was apparently a metaphor for anger management issues, except he had those on top of the lycanthropy as well as just being more and more of an asshole the further the series went. And you end up with Bright, which is so busy with its metaphor for racism and police violence that the fantasy aspects of the world are never properly integrated into the world and its history.

And that was an awful lot of words for a movie that I didn’t even particularly like.

[nessysweet]

Well, in case some of you want to know what it's like to be a white person in Philly, don't read this. It won't tell you much, except that:

✓ Black people are dangerous

✓ Gentrification = Progress

✓ White people only care about black problems when it begins to affect them personally.

✓  White people don't like to talk about race out of fear of being slapped with a "racist" sticker. But a lot of things white people say are still really fucking racist, or at least highly prejudiced.