[junkyarded]

how it feels to call the fan favorite character a misogynist

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

a thing that was so interesting about the vampires in Sinners is genuinely what huge losers they are. get bit and immediately start talking like the most annoying youth pastor you know.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

which is a really cool choice because it emphasizes how deeply Off they are. there are obviously the big tells in their behavior, like Bo not reacting to a man getting mauled five feet away or Cornbread getting weird at the door, but the way they speak is also really off with the cadence of the movie the audience has gotten accustomed to. the characters are friends, family, they know each other enough to make jokes, trade barbs, argue, swear. they talk in an informal, natural way with each other. one bite later and it's "excuse me my brothers and sisters in the one race, the human race, won't you pretty please let me come inside to rejoice in your company 🥺"

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

the kkkouple that remmick turns first are a really effective storytelling shorthand. we know basically nothing about them pre-vampening except that they're trigger happy racists, so when you see them turn up all smiles at a Black juke joint parroting everything remmick says you immediately get a pretty solid grasp of what getting bit does to a motherfucker

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

obviously I'm arriving to this party really late and I've already seen almost every bit of this movie dissected down to the minutia, but I've not seen anyone talk about klanwife's line about how the vampires are "starting a new klan, built on love." crazy good line, made me figuratively need to take a seat. really cuts right to the heart of the dissonance between what mr. o'vampire says he believes and the nightmare bullshit that he's actually doing.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

I keep thinking about the big vampire group song because it's like. god this scene is good. it circles back to my point about remmick being a loser, because getting a couple dozen new vampire thralls and using them to do an elaborately choreographed song and dance is peak loser shit.

but it's also horrifying, absolutely horrifying, for the living characters who are looking on because a.) they're watching their dead family and friends and neighbors, most of whom are covered in blood and visibly injured, get danced around like puppets and b.) it's the first time the characters are really getting a taste of the hivemind bullshit the audience has already been clued in on and c.) sure, they're just dancing for now, but they're realizing just how many hungry vampires are waiting outside to kill them at the first opportunity and take Sammie. so that's a nightmare for them.

so you could read that as a deliberate intimidation tactic on remmick's part, trying to overwhelm the survivors into giving up, but then you're like, okay, maybe in his mind this is a display of how good it is to be a vampire. isn't it good? doesn't it look fun? look how much fun we're having! you could come have fun too if you want! just let me in :3 I don't think that's impossible, that he'd be totally oblivious to how he comes across. the newly-turned vampires seem pretty bad at faking their interpersonal skills; all memory of how to act human beyond the most superficial level seems to really go out the window pretty immediately. remmick seems a little cannier than that, since we see him try to play on people's emotions more than once--appealing to the kkkouple's fear of the Choctaw to gain their shelter when he realizes they're klan, trying to lower Mary's guard by sympathizing with her over her dead mother, pressuring Grace by threatening her daughter. obviously some of those efforts are more successful than others, but he at least seems to have an ability to read the room that other vampires lack.

but it's also not a stretch at all to think he might sincerely be that clueless, because that whole song and dance number is remmick's whole thesis statement, which is that when he says he believes in "equality" he means that he'll kill anyone and turn them into one of his tools regardless of who they are. like sure, whatever, I'm willing to believe that he does sincerely find the klan objectionable, but he's also just packed full of shit. his version of equality is one where everyone's equal under him, acting out his own culture and history for his pleasure. thinks he's not racist because he doesn't care that Sammie's Black but still wants to take away everything that makes Sammie an individual and just keep the musical talent to perform a crude facsimile of being Irish.

and this is getting so long but that scene of all the vampires dancing in step in the dark, cold and washed out, is contrasted so well with the earlier scene inside the juke where everyone is warmly lit, revolving around Sammie but not beholden to him, dancing in their own styles side by side with spirits of the past and future blending different styles and cultures. that scene is such a gorgeous visualization of musical traditions persisting through time and place, connecting people across generations, growing and changing fluidly as people take inspiration from the past, while all of remmick's songs show people being very forcibly trapped in the past, unable to grow or move on. when he encounters something beautiful in the present all he can think to do is own it, destroy it, bend it into the shape of history. pathetic!

[auramgold]

a lot of people assume psychosis hallucinations are super intense all-consuming horror movie shit like the memes about the hat man or always horrible debilitating things that make you dangerous to be around

but in my experience 95% of my hallucinations are getting spooked by very clearly hearing someone knocking on my door or calling my name from another room or hearing footsteps walking behind me which are "just" my brain recreating the horror of an abusive childhood

i *have* gotten the "bugs crawling all over me" hallucination once or twice though and yeah that one is exactly as terrible horrible as it sounds AUGH

[auramgold]

(not trying to put you on blast specifically, you're just a good example to jump off of)

media and pop culture hypes up psychosis a lot as The Worst That Can Happen out of sanism, so even when you try and filter that cultural bias out you still assume it's based on something

when, no, psychosis is actually very simple: it's just hyperactive pattern matching. it's your brain's signal-to-noise ratio being off balance, it's seeing images in random static. it's not always this special uniquely big thing, it's in fact quite mundane a lot of the time.

no one is immune to psychosis, it's not purely the realm of the insane. anyone is one bad night of sleep or one bad case of food poisoning or one bad fever away from being just like me on my worst days.

and this, indeed, is why solidarity with the insane is so important: you, yes you too, are just one bad day from joining us, and no perceptions of being a "temporarily embarrassed sane person" will save you from the oppression of the psychiatric institution.

[mooned-knights]

is anyone else annoyed that "ai" encompasses both chatgpt and tools we train to do repetitive tedious work for us. and by the ripple effect of articles like "scientists develop ai to detect cancer early" that make people argue for the merit of chatgpt or become anti-medicine. and by the general state of the world and society

[tsscat]

The technologies used for cancer detection and chatgpt are not that far apart and are highly overlapping, in fact. There is no distinctly good AI technology and distinctly bad AI technology that we just put together under the umbrella of AI and never distinguish when discussing them for no reason. “AI” as a term IS nebulous and sometimes unclear in definition, but we don’t call technologies AI for no reason.

[making-friendos]

A series

[making-friendos]

An addition:

Small dogs are good dogs too!

[lillie-garden]

really not pleased about having to do this again and i'm sorry but:

6 months ago, i was banned from twitch, my only source of income, for, and i quote: "". They did not provide me a reason. The person who reported me has been going around telling trans women to kill themselves and bragging about reporting me. Now that it has been 6 months, however, I can at least request reinstatement- theoretically.

Unfortunately, I can't get into the appeals page or my twitch account at all; I can't even change the phone number used for 2fa because the 2fa service is that shit, and the phone number associated with the account belongs to a friend who is way behind on his bills after a divorce.

we've managed to get most of them paid, but he's still another. $150 away from getting his phone reconnected, at which point i will be switching over to my current number so this never happens again. and then i can maybe actually get my twitch account back.

if anyone has anything they can spare to help, it would be immensely appreciated ;_;

$0/150 as of July 18, 2026

[valtsv]

"here's my original character, Man Who Sucks But Loves His Daughter Very Much" and it's a guy who worships at the altar of patriarchal violence and the woman he uses as an excuse and an effigy to absolve him

[valtsv]

well i think his daughter should tell him to kill himself

[rambling-rosee]

White commentary YouTubers sure love to hate on AI, capitalism, and misogyny but when you ask them how they feel on racism it’s

[ms-demeanor]

milcl (man i love copyright law)

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or sincere but either way mickey mouse isn't going to fuck you.

[ms-demeanor]

milrwjamudcacaltdartsfhtlaodwarbopagkbaapm (man i love remembering when jstor and mit used draconian copyright and computer access laws to drive a researcher to suicide for his totally legal access of documents written and researched by other people and gate kept by an academic publishing monopoly)

[ms-demeanor]

No actually the core of my argument here is that data scraping is good actually and information wants to be free and it's more important that we guarantee protection for the right to access and use and transform information than it is to strengthen copyright for any reason.

[techtonicactivity]

#internwizard (asker) has clarified that this was sarcasm

[bluering8]

listen to me, this is so so important: you've gotta get used to really giving it your 60% as a default. like don't half-ass it necessarily but try not to go over 70% or so of an ass. you'll feel better and live a happier more fulfilled life, and on the rare occasions where you do need to lock the fuck in you'll be able to pull off bullshit that the sad miserable wretches giving it their 100% can never dream off, because they're busy draining themselves dry and you have energy reserves to spare.

[smokingchagga]

This is actually what I was adviced to do at the work rehabilitation program I went to. Hasn't left my mind since. 10/10 solid advice

[parasitoidism]

we all have that one friend trying to rebuild the world according to their own warped philosophy

[anodymalion]

Also while it’s on my mind, I wanted to write down stuff from a really interesting panel I went to at the con, run by a guy who does anime market research and marketing strategy, about the data behind anime viewership and revenue. I think it’s especially interesting coming on the heels of the Crunchyroll Anime Awards and the discussions I've seen around it (mostly around not being happy with the winners).

I wasn’t taking notes during it, but this is what I remember to the best of my ability; apologies if there are any inaccuracies:

At this point there is more money coming into animanga from overseas markets than from domestic (i.e., Japanese) markets. Companies are aware that for something to get really financially successful, it has to appeal to international audiences.

And most of that overseas money comes from subscriptions to streaming services. Merch / purchase of physical copies / etc make up only a small % of revenue.

Shonen and isekai outperform everything else to a huge extent. So there continue to be lots of these produced.

About half of all recent/current anime views are going to just a few (like, a single digit # of) series. I believe it was: Solo Leveling, Sakamoto Days, Dan Da Dan, Gachiakuta, MHA, and (I think) JJK. Also Solo Leveling by itself gets far more than any other series.

Quote: "Statistically, if your favorite anime from the last year wasn’t one of these, then no one watched your favorite anime"

Note that these are all shonen (except technically Solo Leveling since the original material is manhwa, not manga, but close enough)

Don’t be surprised that these are the series winning awards, even if you don’t think they hold a candle to [insert your favorite anime here] — there’s just so many more people watching these that it’s virtually impossible for any other series to win.

The only series in the recent top 20 that wasn’t shonen demographic or isekai genre was Apothecary Diaries.

Quote: "Thank god for Apothecary Diaries." lol

Crunchyroll has by far the biggest market share of overseas anime viewership, followed by Netflix to a lesser extent. No other providers come close.

The perception among production companies is that Netflix is where people are getting converted from non-anime viewers into anime viewers, and CR is where established anime viewers go.

Average anime watch time among anime viewers on Netflix is 1.5 hours per month, whereas on CR it’s 1.5 hours per day (?!)

Discovery on Netflix is heavily determined by what the Netflix promotes / actively surfaces to users, and that tends to skew towards particular series — likely reinforces that views are going to already-popular series and that new anime viewers are getting funnelled into certain genres.

Netflix doesn't license all that much anime compared to what they could be licensing, so that further skews things. Also, even if a series is licensed to Netflix, if the Netflix algorithm doesn't actively push it to users, no one on Netflix will watch it.

Rating sites such as MyAnimeList tend to be skewed towards a particular type of fan that is not representative of the actual market, and these ratings are meaningless when it comes to actual success metrics. IIRC he said only a few% of very frequent anime watchers actually rate/review things.

He phrased it as "rating things on MAL is not normal behavior" which made me lol

Anime adapted from light novels tends to perform the best compared to anime adapted from other sources (manga, webcomic, games) and original anime. Adaptations from manga is #2; everything else is wayy behind.

Solo Leveling seems like quite an outlier in this regard since anime adaptations from webcomics tend to be among the least popular

The single feature most correlated with success of an isekai was whether the main female character has big breasts and that’s not a joke.

Quote: "If the main female character has big breasts your anime will likely overperform, and if the main female character is a monster girl your anime will likely underperform. Because things aren’t fair."

At one point he was like yes I really do have to go into serious business meetings and present this anime breast data to client companies.

There’s a perception among audiences that pirating animanga that isn’t legally available in your country will prove there’s a demand for it, and lead to it getting licensed in your country, but this isn’t true. Pirating stats don’t actually have much effect on whether stuff gets licensed — because there’s no reliable conversion from people who pirate -> people who will pay to view legally.

Studios get booked for projects 3-4 years out, so stuff for 2029-2030 is getting booked now. There are a lot of reboots/sequels/franchises/reusing-IPs type projects getting booked, just like what western media studios have been doing, because (as with western media) companies want the reliability of IP that is known to be successful rather than the risk of something new.

He concluded that the quality of storytelling in animanga is completely unrelated to whether it is popular, and that, at the current time, the popularity of a series essentially just comes down to 1. is it a shonen, 2. sheer luck. rip

[wizardarchetypes]

person just walked into my job and said, "oh! i've seen a lot of people in masks lately. there's not something going around is there?"

baby there is always something going around

[wizardarchetypes]

like even if we ignore covid & the flu, which is what most people mean when they ask this sort of thing, that is just the nature of human history. there's many other things you can "get" and any of them can cause permanent injury. we are SO lax about "stomach flu" but getting norovirus multiple times is Not Good.

luckily we have power to lessen the risks, even if you're unwilling or unable to mask. Such steps include: Washing your hands.

everyone get more educated about public health NOW.

[ohwhatagloomyshow]

do you remember why you followed prev

yes :)

no :)

Remaining time: 4 days 6 hours

[blumineck]

This tickled me!

More of my content

[techtonicactivity]

Thought this maneuver was so cool that I slowed it down for a gif comparison!

[antigonick]

Revolutionaries in Africa understood that the question of African liberation was not just a question of race, that even if they managed to get rid of the white colonialists, if they didn’t rid themselves of the capitalistic economic structure, the white colonialists would simply be replaced by Black neocolonialists. There was not a single liberation movement in Africa that was not fighting for socialism. In fact, there was not a single liberation movement in the whole world that was fighting for capitalism. The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn’t working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it.

—Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

[allcops]

“The police spend very little of their time dealing with violent criminals—indeed, police sociologists report that only about 10% of the average police officer’s time is devoted to criminal matters of any kind. Most of the remaining 90% is spent dealing with infractions of various administrative codes and regulations: all those rules about how and where one can eat, drink, smoke, sell, sit, walk, and drive. If two people punch each other, or even draw a knife on each other, police are unlikely to get involved. Drive down the street in a car without license plates, on the other hand, and the authorities will show up instantly, threatening all sorts of dire consequences if you don’t do exactly what they tell you. The police, then, are essentially just bureaucrats with weapons. Their main role in society is to bring the threat of physical force—even, death—into situations where it would never have been otherwise invoked, such as the enforcement of civic ordinances about the sale of untaxed cigarettes.”

— An excerpt from Ferguson & the Criminalization of American Life by David Graeber (via actjustly)

[noneedtofearorhope]

since i think many will have had the memory slip with just how many other atrocities have occured in the past 11 years, or are simply too young to remember, the last bit about the sale of untaxed cigarettes isn’t just some hypothetical, it’s a reference to the killing of eric garner

Killing of Eric Garner - Wikipedia

this is the origin of the slogan “i cant breathe”, which was revived in the wake of the killing of george floyd.

[alanshemper]

On this day, 17 July 2014, Eric Garner was murdered by police enforcing a civic ordinance.