The Name Is The Hardest Part

[voyaging-too]

That Carrie post reminded me of my biggest and oldest pet peeve: adaptations taking a character who's supposed to be ugly, or at least not beautiful, and casting someone perfect-looking. A lot of the time this is simple misogyny, but the inability to allow ugly people to exist also extends to men and boys, and I remember how pissed I was when I started understanding this at around the age of eight.

Bastian of the Neverending Story is fat and weird-looking, in the movie he's a perfectly photogenic all-American kid.

Hermione is buck-toothed and unpretty, in the movies she's a perfect little girl who grows into a very attractive woman.

Carrie is fat and unpretty, in the movies she's a supermodel in slightly unflattering clothes.

Don't even talk to me about Ugly Betty.

The latest Frankenstein adaptation continues a long trend of trying to convey the message of "this monster is not inherently evil" by making the monster look good. Because obviously if the monster did look bad, it would be evil and people would be justified in shunning it.

Even supposedly more serious media does it. Imre Kertész's Holocaust novel Fateless has a minor character, a wimpy weird-looking member of the group of boys who got deported together. The other boys don't really like him, and disdainfully agree when he's deemed not fit for work - of course they don't yet know that it's a death sentence. In the atrocious movie he's not weaker just younger, a photogenic little boy, and him being sent to his death is played as a sentimental tearjerker for the audience instead of forcing us to grapple with the complexity of the original, where mundane teen boy cruelty continues to exist in boys who are currently victims of a genocide.

A written text says: this person is ugly, this affects how people treat them, this affects how they feel about themselves, how they behave, how they live in the world. This might just be an incidental part of their story, or it might be its entire point of the whole fucking book. And then the movie sweeps in and says: oh, but they aren't ugly! They have always been beautiful! They are being bullied and shunned for no reason! So unfair!

And the unintentional but very obvious implication arises that if they *were* ugly, of course they would deserve the bullying, the audience would agree that they deserve the bullying, the audience would want to join in, kick spit point laugh. The idea of empathizing with an actually ugly person doesn't compute. (Maybe it's clear by now that this has done low-grade but long-lasting damage to me as a person: weird ugly people are simply not allowed to exist, not even in stories about being weird and ugly.)

Btw this is why "everyone is beautiful" type body-positivity does nothing for me, and why I'm hyper-sensitive to how people discuss ugliness in reality and in fiction. For example, I love the Just King Things and the Shelved by Genre podcasts, but I think they struggle to see the value of written descriptions of ugliness. They interpret Steven King's descriptions of Carrie as cruel, they interpret Tiptree's description of P. Burke in The Girl who was Plugged In as cruel and fatphobic. Sure, I don't want to give King kudos for all his depictions of women, but he did get it right that time, and Tiptree absolutely did. Describing a character, especially a woman as ugly, genuinely ugly, no not secretly beautiful, actually ugly, and then telling her story, a story about existing in the world as an ugly woman, is really really fucking important. And people keep shying away from it, oh, it's cruel to call anyone ugly, let's pretend that ugly people don't exist instead.

[asneakyfox]

one of my favorite bits in lord of the rings is something the movies didn't really try to do because it's entirely internal, but sam's carrying the ring and it starts trying to do its work on him, so he's having these intrusive visions of himself marching at the head of a vast and terrible army, and he just starts laughing because, me? samwise gamgee? sam gamgee the general sam gamgee the dark lord are you for real? man i just want to go home and do some gardening. and the ring gets frustrated and it starts trying to figure out other stuff that would actually tempt sam and it's finally like, okay, but hear me out: imagine if you could have...A REALLY REALLY BIG GARDEN

[asneakyfox]

and then he's like, i don't know that sounds like a lot more work than a regular garden actually. why don't we just get on with finding mister frodo

[siena-sevenwits]

[writingdose]

this used to be a common knowledge

via AO3Tikli 2022

[leatafandom]

[macmanx]

[babyfoxcollectionthings]

[ampervadasz]

[masterkfox]

my two brain cells

[vigilantsycamore]

This is what executive dysfunction looks like

[a-book-of-creatures]

Inside you there are two hamsters…

[thememedaddy]

[the-final-sif]

So! This is a perfect case study in situations where you should be wary of misinformation.

Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?

The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!

This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.

Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:

Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or

Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.

The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.

The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).

Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.

So yeah, there's actually quite a lot of places that would like these. Lots of people currently breathing in terrible quality air would much rather have their boring city benches replaced with really fucking cool algae tanks that clean the air and can be used to help create + sustain future green spaces in cities. I dunno about you, but I'd take that over a dumb metal bench any day. Put these at every bus stop and I'd be delighted.

[straawberries]

can ppl pls reblog this version

[obsidian-flame]

Serbian here living in Belgrade! This is all true and I've actually seen some of these around the city a few times. They're amazing at what they do and really cool to watch up close because you can see pretty swirling inside them. It's not only functional but aesthetically pretty nice as well!

[phaeton-flier]

"without parental consent" yeah uhhh if the human being can understand and consent to it then the parents can go pound sand.

[phaeton-flier]

This applies to everything but It's doubly fucked up when it's it gets slyly dropped as a "reasonable requirement" for abortion, because "your parents force you to give birth" is extremely fucked up yet it's not immediately called out.

[lakemojave]

People are unfazed if you hate women but if you dislike dogs they assume you're a bad person

[lakemojave]

Tumblr users will read a post complaining about normalized misogyny and hyperfocus on your claim that it's ok to dislike dogs

[foodffs]

Chocolate Kisses (Baci di Cioccolato)

Follow for recipes

Is this how you roll?

[tamamowand]

HAPPY PRIDE MONTH EVERYBODY*

here's the lgbtq tag trending as it does regularly due to pornbots catfishing using the same stolen photos from the same trans woman on the same trending tags page

remember the year in review? this was one of the featured tags

here's tumblr staff stating that making death threats towards trans women isn't a violation of the ToS or user guidelines

type of shit you can just say to trans women on this website. same person btw

here's tumblr staff terminating me for appealing the explicit flag on a post immediately before accepting said appeal and then terminating my already terminated blog to change the termination reason to something i can't appeal when I appealed the termination for explicit content

here's tumblr staff doing the exact same thing a second time

here's tumblr staff flagging SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY MY REBLOGS of a year old post with 15,000 notes as sexually explicit despite it not actually showing anything

here's SPECIFICALLY AND EXCLUSIVELY MY REBLOG of a post with gifs of two fully nude people fucking center frame being flagged as sexually explicit and the same gifs in the trending tags thumbnails

here's tumblr letting people blaze sissy hypno captions even though anything actually mentioning trans women gets denied

here's tumblr giving my original blog of 13 years a special kind of mature flag that automatically marked every single post i made as mature content separate from the actual content label

here's one of the pictures of the PMMM gachapon toys from the photoset of them that someone reported as CSAM that tumblr terminated me for - one of the two surviving images from it, from back when they actually bothered to moderate posts instead of just hitting the nuke button without looking

here's tumblr instantly denying my appeal for these terminations before I even get the email where they assure me they will carefully review it

here's tumblr terminating me 5 times in the weeks it took them to remove a burner blog and a single post encouraging people to mass report me and harass me forever over completely fabricated claims

here's tumblr flagging my already mature-flagged blog as mature out of the blue 15 minutes before dropping the age verification shit

and here's the episode of the anime that I posted a screencap from that they flagged as sexually explicit, denied my appeal on twice, and then marked my blog mature the first time for posting - available for viewing on youtube with a TV-14 age rating

*except transfems

[tamamoland-with-a-gun]

[doyoulovethewayzeylily]

@staff you know we see all this shit right?

[rathayibacter]

oh you did, did you?

[my-dailydreams]

[anarchopuppy]

call me a crackpot conspiracy theorist but i dont think its a coincidence that right around the time the us and uk governments were going mask-off transphobic and directly instructing intelligence agencies to treat trans activists as "violent extremists" english speaking social media became flooded w discourse driving a wedge between two of the largest subcomminities of trans ppl, with tons of definitely super real accounts posting shit like "grrr im a trans man and i think whiney feminist trans women should shut their bitch mouths and get back in the kitchen" or "grrrrr i think we should kill all men ESPECIALLY trans men and btw im a totally real trans woman"

[anarchopuppy]

im not saying trans ppl are incapable of being transphobic. lots of ppl are assholes and some of those assholes happen to be trans. but if ur constantly focusing on trans ppl like theyre the main driving force of transphobia in society, while cis politicians are actively dismantling our rights, then ur acting like a fed and im gonna treat u like one. we need to stop fighting each other and start fighting together

[optical-trapping]

[userfish]

this pride month we’re all going to be radically pro transgender. or else.

[mxtomituck]

OR.

ELSE.

[sadomarxist]

[ruckuscauser]

[despazito]

I don't have time for tumblr discourse they're calling the very hungry caterpillar degenerate art over on twitter

[despazito]

good art is when something looks like real life, the more real it looks the more better the art. abstracted figures give my trad children nightmares, one time they were exposed to cubism and couldn't go outside for a week

[draculasstrawhat]

Huh fascinating, I wonder what the fash have against Eric Carle? I wonder what he might have said about his life, and influences, and early experiences that makes them say he’s part of an ‘insalubrious culture’?

Carle's 'Blue Horse' teaches kids to think outside the box

Franz Marc (1880-1916) was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of the German Expressionist movement.