La Vida es Rara

Just my many and varied trains of thought. Please feel free to check out my secondary blogs "Reel Around the Downton" and "Britpick Fic Tips"

[fieldexplores]

Spring Break - Gator Days

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

If you're comfortable accusing anyone of faking disability, you're not a real ally to disabled people

[teaboot]

One time when I was a kid a group of girls and I had to treat another student for hypothermia by ourselves because she had so many invisible health issues that the adults we asked for help didn't believe us. The student in question was actively hallucinating. When I finally ran for help the people I grabbed were slow as shit to respond, casually joking about how "dramatic" the person in question was.

The kid was picked up by an ambulance 30 minutes later.

Now as an adult working in security I get SO MANY folks- upper-middle aged mostly- coming to me to 'rat out' people they think are faking it.

I was once sent into a bathroom because a client demanded that the "fucker won't get out, so go drag them out"- I was NEVER going to do that, so I did a wellness check instead. You know who it was? A person recently released from the hospital after a car accident. They had a hole in their skull and major hearing loss. They couldn't answer the owner because they couldn't HEAR the owner.

Another time about a homeless man who got around town by kicking the ground from his wheelchair. "You know he doesn't actually need that thing, his legs work fine, it's just for pity points"- Oh, so he's not paralyzed, his wheelchair is performative? Funny story Dale, I actually know that guy, he was backed over by a truck and has chronic pain from his shattered pelvis. But sure, let's make him stand up and walk everywhere so nobody feels too bad for him and tries to help him or something.

"She doesn't need that scooter, I've seen her get out of it."

"Look how fat he is, because he just rides around and refuses to get up."

"She doesn't really need that cane- she comes here without it all the time"

Sincerely, truly, from the bottom of my heart- as someone who isn't physically disabled but hears this shit all the time- fuck off

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[theviciouslily]

And when you realise it’s coming from someone else’s phone, you thank God it’s them instead of you.

[oleanderfey]

There's something crookedly parental about the outie/innie interactions. Hey I made you, a conscious human being, for selfish reasons. I wanted to redeem myself. I needed to cope. Etc. Now let me dictate how you live. You depend on me to live. You depend on me to feed you. I control you. Don't follow your own wants you'll ruin me. You didn't choose this life but you need to choose me. I care about you, don't you see? I let you live. That's how much I care. You only exist because I let you. Aren't you grateful? Why don't you care about me? I am a person. You are not.

[theviciouslily]

“I'm big and you're small, I'm right and you're wrong, and there's nothing you can do about it!”

[why-am-i-simping-for-a-train]

The fact that “I’m so beautiful” was changed to “I’m so pretty” in the Wembley production brings me an insane amount of unexplainable rage

[bellesdomain]

It undermines everything they're saying that they're trying to do.

"Pretty" carries connotations of girly, delicate, decorative. Society has been pressuring girls to be pretty - don't play in the mud, keep your hair nice, don't get sweaty, make sure you look pretty. Wear a nice pretty dress, you can't play football but you look pretty! Young girls are judged pretty, but as you get older you're not pretty anymore.

"Beautiful" is far more serious than "Pretty". "Pretty" is transient, fragile, something that needs to be coddled and protected or it'll be destroyed. "Beautiful" is the view of the mountains, it's the power of nature, a wild horse is beautiful, a work of art is beautiful. It carries connotations beyond appearance, into power, and intent, and nature. Whether these connotations are justified or not is a different question, but that's how culture uses the word!

Someone who is beautiful is judged to be more valuable than someone who is not - and beauty is considered to be a core characteristic rather than, say, makeup skills. Again, this is about the cultural perception of the word, rather than my personally agreeing with it!

Most directly for Greaseball, Pumping Iron - at the end of a heavy workout, you're a sweaty mess. You're not pretty. But you're grinning and confident, pleased with your performance, you're beautiful.

If Greaseball has got to the end of Pumping Iron and she's "so pretty!" that implies she's spent the whole time checking her appearance rather than actually working out. It makes her sound like "teehee giggle I'm a girly girl who's been at the gym! Look at my cute gym clothes! I'm so pretty!" rather than "Whooof I been working out so hard, look at my muscles, it's all worth it I look GOOD!"

[theviciouslily]

I had some similar thoughts about this as well, and I think it ties in a bit with what you were saying earlier about the whole approach the Wembley production has to its costumes.

I always thought that original "joke" about Greaseball saying that line was that he was vain and his bodybuilding was an expression of that. Of course men are expected to be strong, but taking any conscious interest in your own appearance is for girls!

Women on the other hand tend to be the recipients of a lot of negative messaging if they decide to get jacked. They're told it's unfeminine, that no one will find them attractive if they look more masculine. So, I think it would be much more effective for Greaseball to say, "I'm so hot" at the end of Pumping Iron after she's had a whole song about how hard she works to look this good while her girlfriend fawns over her.

But to deliver that line with any sort of conviction would probably stray from the much more kid-friendly direction the show has gone in. I saw the Wembley production not too long after it opened in June and although I enjoyed the performance of Pumping Iron, I got the sense that Al Knott had been directed to play up the bombast rather than to try and convey even a tiny modicum of sex appeal alongside that.

The whole more family-friendly pivot shows up in the costumes. I get that there might be a health-and-safety reason to have them, but I think the backpacks in particular give them a very juvenile look. The shiny, smooth surfaces make the actors look like toys. With all the will in the world, the script on its own does not provide a huge amount of detail when it comes to characterisation, so this shiny-blandification of the costumes has the same effect on of the characters themselves. There's nothing about Greaseball's costume that suggests "bodybuilder", or even just grease! Why not give the wig a wet curl look?

[gayrandalgraves]

hi everybody please reblog this and tell me your go-to coffee order right now and if you don't like coffee feel free to include your go-to tea order instead

[theviciouslily]

Medium hot chocolate with cream and cinnamon sprinkles.

[theviciouslily]

Can’t believe the Olympic flame was carried by an anime villain.

[catsbypawty]

Hello, tumblr user. Before you is a tumblr post asking you to name a female fictional character. You have unlimited time to tag a female character, NOT a male one.

Begin.

[didanagy]

BRIDGERTON SEASON 3 (PART 2) BTS

03x06

(instagram bridgertonnetflix)

[theviciouslily]

Telling my kids this was N-Dubz for that first one.

[parsleyroot]

largely culturally christian question sorry but i was talking about this with my mum and i’m curious….

do you hear church bells/adhan/any other kind of call to prayer etc from home

yes, daily

yes, but only on holidays or when there's a wedding/funeral

no, but i used to somewhere i previously lived/there is a church in the vicinity

never, this is not a normal/familiar experience where i live

nuance (please elaborate in tags)

Voting ended onJun 3, 2024

rb and add where you’re from if you want!

[silvermoon424]

Were you taught how to type on a computer keyboard in school? Include your age/age range in the tags

Yes

No

Voting ended onNov 24, 2023

This is a subject that really interests me because I (28 years old) had computer classes in grade school where learning how to efficiently type was a big focus. As a result I have a very high WPM (words per minute) count and am an excellent touch typer.

However, I've heard that they started phasing out computer classes in a lot of schools because it's assumed that kids/teenagers already know how to use a computer in this day and age. But smartphones are more popular than computers now, and as result a lot of Gen Z/Gen Alpha kids are able to text very quickly but their typing skills aren't as good.

[theviciouslily]

My primary school started doing IT lessons when I was about 7, but I don’t recall many lessons that focussed on typing, although there were a few on how to use Microsoft Word. I can touch type reasonably quickly because my dad had a Mavis Beacon CD-ROM, so that’s how I learned.

[thealogie]

what happened with sherlock is that we were all like “it’s 2014 you cannot possibly be using early 2000s queer coding without following through on it we simply don’t live in those times any more” but everyone involved lived in the UK where they are always at least 7 years behind culturally and they genuinely were living in those times. They were just having a little house md moment but on steroids

[theviciouslily]

I dunno. Of course it's easy to say we were all naïve back then, but I kept up with a lot of shows airing around the same time on the BBC and ITV. Major shows like Call the Midwife, Broadchurch, The Fall and Last Tango in Halifax all had queer storylines that at least appeared to be breaking new ground. You could have been forgiven for thinking at the time that an honest-to-god paradigm shift was happening.

[catchymemes]

Complete the phrase

[theviciouslily]

Blue Lights

[theviciouslily]

Our Wives Under the Sea

[sian-is-really-rather-gay]

I’d watch it

[theviciouslily]

Kate's purple jacket honestly suits her much better than the Pink Monstrosity she wore in the last episode.

[showandtelltime]

It's Show & Tell Time!

What's your most controversial opinion about food?

[devilscum]

French food is overrated. They just colonized folks into thinking it was top tier.

[theviciouslily]

Day-to-day Spanish food is pretty bad. Except the Starbucks vanilla muffins that you can get there but not in the UK.

[olderthannetfic]

What do you think about the "queerbaiting" in Stranger Things? Real thing or Tumblr teens with poorly developed theory of mind?

--

I was busy screaming about J-Hope and have not had time to watch Stranger Things, so I can't weigh in on the second half of the season yet.

Generally, ST has wussed out on using Netflix to full advantage. It's whiteboy nostalgia media that's slowly creeping towards caring about female characters. I'm impressed they managed to add a lesbian, and the lesbian+straight guy duo thing is pretty fun. We usually see straight women with gay best friends.

But overall, ST has always been default HET HET HET HET all over the place. Every single moment of everything to do with Nancy's love life screams "straight nerdy guy writer". They're so deeply embedded in that mindset that I would not hope for much from them.

I never expected them to do anything interesting with Will. I guess once I watch the second half of the season, I'll see if it's as meh as I expect, actively infuriating, or a pleasant surprise.

[arslanjae]

Not spoiling but what they showed with Will was not queerbaiting in the slightest, not even a little bit and not even with the most generous interpretation of queerbaiting. If people are upset because Will and Mike didn't get together then that's because they widely misinterpreted some prior scenes they had together, namely the "you didn't write I love you on your letters" - scene.

I've seen posts where people said that was proof that Mike was in love with Will and was only somewhat hanging onto El buuuuut that scene was just the "women being hysterical about love things and angry and sad because men didn't show enough affection and couldn't read the woman's mind" trope that crops up everywhere (it was just handled better).

I really liked what they did in the last two episodes with Will's character. It was bitter and sad and it was probably not the end of this storyline. El and Mike being together was a foregone conclusion.

[olderthannetfic]

Having now watched, I’m pleasantly surprised (though partly because I wasn’t expecting much).

They’d already hinted at Will’s one-sided feelings a number of times. I was pleased to see them make that entirely canonical. We can argue about exactly what constitutes subtext vs. text, but I think the editing makes this count as canonical even without a verbal confirmation. The way they repeatedly went to those closeups of Will and the way they had Jonathan repeatedly pick up on it makes it obvious what conclusion they want the audience to draw.

I’m so glad he didn’t say anything to Mike verbally. Mike is so annoying, and watching him be all sad and apologetic at Will would make my skin crawl. It has always been obvious that Mike is obsessed with El and not going to change.

The sort of thing I hope for from a show like this is a coda at the end of the final season where we see them ten years down the line and Will shows up with some random dude on his arm.

[theviciouslily]

Will deserves better than Mike anyway.