toonscallop

all I do is talk shit

[strawberry-crocodile]

for real tho it feels exhausting that ive seen this whole "woman should be allowed to abstain from X beauty standard" -> "i perform X beauty standard, am i evil? do you think im evil? please forgive me i came up with a dozen excuses 🥺" since like 2015 (and i know its been going on longer than that) like girl thats not the poiiiiint

[strawberry-crocodile]

look me in the eyes. repeat after me. "i face societal pressure to perform this beauty standard. i should not face that pressure. i conform to this standard. i am rewarded for performing to this standard. i need to respect women who do not perform this standard. this is not about whether or not i am a sinner for wearing makeup."

[shyocean]

This is all true. But also, people are not acting irrationally when they respond defensively .

Getting called a sinner, or a scab or strikebreaker, or a collaborator, or being accused of breaking ranks or harming other women is pretty standard from the left. People policing ideological purity, people who resent anyone with more privilege, etc.

And they are also hammered from the right.

In fact, I can easily point to so many narratives where the villain is an aging woman trying to stay beautiful and/or retain power. Misogyny really does villainize women who try to conform to beauty standards unnaturally in order to maintain access to social standing.

There's an intuitive contempt for the intelligence and morality of beautiful women from both sides. I think of that painting of a naked woman looking in a mirror called Vanity, which judges the mafe up woman, not the painter, audiencevor social system.

Women who are older, fatter, or otherwise outside of the standard who took obvious steps are especially hard hit.

So it's really important to repeat. You are not a sinner.

And the system is hurting you and everyone else.

These are both true.

[toonscallop]

OK, here's the Real Important Thing: People who react defensively when posed with X topic and people who name-call in response are both acting irrationally (or selfishly, or stupidly, or childishly, take your pick), because they are derailing a discussion of systemic pressures to one that re-frames misogynistic beauty standards as a problem of personal responsibility, which misogynistic beauty standards are certainly not.

While it is enticing to believe that personal moral uprightness will one day uplift you from the lower realm of misogyny into a heaven free from unrealistic body standards, that's a fucking stupid idea and not how the real world works at all.

"Women being pressured to uphold X beauty standard" is not affected at all by whether or not you decide to do X on a personal level. It is simply a descriptor for how you have less social value if you don't.

To put it crudely, under misogynistic beauty standards, you can't "ugly" or "pretty" your way into "being valued while ugly". You can only "ugly" your way into "being less valued", and "pretty" your way into "being more valued". No amount of moving within a system will make you free of it.

People like to frame systemic issues as personal responsibilities, because personal responsibilities are small things that can be solved by the individual. It gives people the illusion of control (and someone to blame). However, systemic inequality is not addressed by sitting at home alone and letting your pubes grow. Neither is it addressed by saying mean shit to strangers for living under those same pressures as everyone else (crabs-in-a-bucket mentality). These are both bitch-ass measures that soothe the ego, but don't actually incite real change.

Systemic change is caused by challenging how you and other people perceive people under the systems of inequality, maintaining the active conversation about inequality, and addressing inequality through action. Things like making more people conscientious of biases in how you and other people are treated for not adhering to the established social rule, and speaking out to protect undervalued people in areas where you actually do have social power.

So when a conversation about systemic pressure (Ex:"Women should be allowed to abstain from shaving their legs") has dozens of responses of "I shave my legs🥺🥺🥺 am I a bad person? 🥺🥺🥺", that is dozens of people completely missing the point.

If instead of worrying about their own shaved legs, they spoke up the next time they heard someone without shaved legs get called "gross" or "lazy", maybe we might be getting somewhere.

[shyocean]

When a topic like this has dozens of responses in the notes where people are like, "you see, you are actually a bad person," that is also a lot of people missing the point.

See this post's notes.

When someone responds to topics like this with, hey, "am I a bad person, I don't want to be a sinner", you can respond with, "no, this is a systemic issue. It's unjust to blame people who are trying to survive systems of inequality for the horrific conditions through which they try to survive. Your complicated relationship to [x thing] is part of a system and structure that harms everyone. Don't hate yourself, don't judge other people either, kill the cop in your head first."

When someone says, "yeah, you need to be better! I enjoy ensuring the left is morally pure and exporting guilt!" it's a bit more tricky to find a way to connect people with what is useful.

Systemic change begins to occur when we unlearn cultural patterns of guilt, harm, and extraction. As long as people are still playing king of the mountain, they are still enacting the same pattern-- same OS different skin.

We are all living in the system that hurts us. We all have to survive it. It is not irrational to respond to hurt in a way that protects yourself.

It is not irrational to want to be loved or likable--rather, it is one of the most basic human drives.

It is not irrational to seek power through shaming others for not conforming to your politics: that behavior is extensively modelled and hard to unlearn.

There are simply better, more effective ways to respond.

It's irrational to think you are genuinely going to free yourself of the dominant hegemonic system that is encoded into your language, culture, institutions, and science, without having to learn how to negotiate from within it. Hopeful, but irrational.

[toonscallop]

You really are stuck on my use of the word "irrational," huh? It might make sense to you, outside observer, that people are acting that way in response to these kinds of posts described by OP, but that doesnt mean they are responding rationally. An action being understandable or sympathetic and an action being irrational are not mutually exclusive.

When people are responding to something emotionally or by lashing out reflexively, are not motivated by reasoning and are not responding by addressing the current situation, their actions are irrational. Someone acting on habit or according to a practiced behavior without reflecting or reasoning is acting irrationally.

The line of thinking "this post made me feel guilty for X beauty standard and its OP's fault" is irrational. People who are clearly pulling in responses and rebuttals to the conversations they wish they were having instead of the one they are actually having with OP up there, are also not thinking clearly about what they are doing and who they are actually talking to. Having war flashbacks to back when you were in the online trenches arguing about shaving your pits is not rational thinking.

Again, this is a post about post responses. Not an actual example of the post being described. People are acting like it is the latter and turning themselves into examples of the people criticized of their own volition. If you think these replies aren't irrational, then I guess rationality is now a civil partner to the poorest of reading comprehension.

IMO telling people they being irrational is an important part of this. It is easy to have a hostile gut reaction and assume there is a reasoned truth behind your response, when the reality is you felt hurt and lashed out at someone, like a child. Actions like that are understandable, but not rational and dont need to be validated by others. A grown ass person's responsibility for emotionally regulating themselves does not need to be turned into a community issue.

[shyocean]

It might help you contextually to understand that I am actually responding to the notes, and I even tagged some responses in the notes to say I had reblogged. So I am talking to people in the notes, which is unusual for Tumblr.

My point here is to re-emphasize a key portion of OP's message -- that no one here is a sinner and that the reflex towarrds judgement or cruelty is counterproductive and re-enacts the same system you are protesting.

We have strongly different ideas of the word rational and it's uses. That's ok. My background with disability justice and neuroethics and mind-focused misogyny makes the word strongly suspect anyway. I am also spending a lot more time with feminist care ethics than many people, which means we're gonna have different beliefs about our responsibility to others.

I feel like the crux of our disagreement is that I am emphasizing that no one is a Sinner or a Bad Person or worthy of being verbally abused or insulted because of their acculurated esponse to a system that hurts them. Such ideas, which the notes are full of, are equally or even more of a problem than defensive responses.

That includes people shaped by misogyny and Anglo protestant culture to feel guilt/ shame/fear/devaluation if everyone doesn't like them all the time, a factor connected to why nakeup feels compulsive. More guilt, more insults, more justified contempt and dismissal, is more enacting the patriarchy.

The problem of contempt coming from both sides reveals contempt as part of the system of control.

And your rhetoric seems to sometimes enact insults or contempt as simply part of how we do business. The line about rationality and poor reading comprehension is very very clever, by the way. It's a zinger.

So I am not actually disagreeing about a lot of substantial topics you bring up. I agree that someone experiencing a trauma trigger is not in a good place to discuss or rethink things.

I am trying to show another underlying systemic force that works along with devaluation based on looks, which is the larger concern of devaluation.

This keeps people locked in place.

If someone on the right could take a post or comment and say "you're right! Women are sooo irrational and dumb! They always are so fucking vain, and it's totally their own fault for trying so hard. They should just wise up, the dumb bitches. That's why they need men to tell them what to do, that's why I feel justified in feeling superior etc"

Then has that post or comment done a feminism, or has it reinscribed masculine standards for respect and longstanding contempt?

Looking for ways to continue feeling self righteous contempt is as counterproductive as looking for ways to continue feeling safe, because it's the same thing.

let's actually rethink the systemic and socioculturally determined oppression within which we exist instead.

[toonscallop]

Feel free to do that on your own. If you think that the good thing to do is to recruit people to do that for others, go ahead. You don't have to try to convince me to do the same, because I don't, and I won't. Also, I don't represent anyone besides me, so you don't have to pull references from any sides to explain what tone or position you think I'm supposed to have. Hell, you even don't know my personal stance on feminism, or makeup, or shaving pubes, and you never will. If you feel particularly sore about irrational responses being called "irrational," because it's (presumably) women I'm speaking to, my tone reads as masculine, and those elements combined turns it into a misogynistic trigger word for you, that seems like something you need to figure out for yourself. I explained to you as clearly as I could why I said "irrational", and my use of it still makes sense to me. I'm not going to go farther to convince you to be comfortable with my word choice. You can have your opinion, and I can disagree. Also, I may have spoken inconsistently, but I don't think I actually told anyone they are "irrational," but wrote specifically "having irrational feelings," "irrational actions," or "behaving irrationally," avoiding actually assigning "irrationality" as a trait to the person I was speaking to (like "sinner"). I don't know if the distinction matters to you, but it does to me. I'm not someone who needs to be coached from a mindset of believing that people are sinners or otherwise immutably flawed due to their character or demographic. Thinking I am means making a lot of assumptions about me and my beliefs. I don't think its stigmatizing to hold grown people up to standards that they are capable of. The person I made the original reply to was able to see how they (no pronouns in bio) were falling into acting exactly like the kind of person being talked about by OP after further conversation with OP. Also, the person who I responded to was not reacting to a trauma trigger but was being reflective and conversational. People like that can handle being checked a little if they acting foolish. Saying that people's feelings from what they are projecting onto OP's post are not OP's fault isn't unreasonable. Saying that they don't have to take so much personal stock into feelings of guilt, that the feeling of guilt in response to hearing that they are following an unfair social pressure is just a reflexive irrational tick in their lizard brain, isn't unreasonable. Feelings happen, and they shouldn't always guide your behavior. Feel them, and move on. Maybe if people weren't so afraid of feeling shame (or being disagreed with), it wouldn't be so easy to use shame to control them.

[strawberry-crocodile]

for real tho it feels exhausting that ive seen this whole "woman should be allowed to abstain from X beauty standard" -> "i perform X beauty standard, am i evil? do you think im evil? please forgive me i came up with a dozen excuses 🥺" since like 2015 (and i know its been going on longer than that) like girl thats not the poiiiiint

[strawberry-crocodile]

look me in the eyes. repeat after me. "i face societal pressure to perform this beauty standard. i should not face that pressure. i conform to this standard. i am rewarded for performing to this standard. i need to respect women who do not perform this standard. this is not about whether or not i am a sinner for wearing makeup."

[shyocean]

This is all true. But also, people are not acting irrationally when they respond defensively .

Getting called a sinner, or a scab or strikebreaker, or a collaborator, or being accused of breaking ranks or harming other women is pretty standard from the left. People policing ideological purity, people who resent anyone with more privilege, etc.

And they are also hammered from the right.

In fact, I can easily point to so many narratives where the villain is an aging woman trying to stay beautiful and/or retain power. Misogyny really does villainize women who try to conform to beauty standards unnaturally in order to maintain access to social standing.

There's an intuitive contempt for the intelligence and morality of beautiful women from both sides. I think of that painting of a naked woman looking in a mirror called Vanity, which judges the mafe up woman, not the painter, audiencevor social system.

Women who are older, fatter, or otherwise outside of the standard who took obvious steps are especially hard hit.

So it's really important to repeat. You are not a sinner.

And the system is hurting you and everyone else.

These are both true.

[toonscallop]

OK, here's the Real Important Thing: People who react defensively when posed with X topic and people who name-call in response are both acting irrationally (or selfishly, or stupidly, or childishly, take your pick), because they are derailing a discussion of systemic pressures to one that re-frames misogynistic beauty standards as a problem of personal responsibility, which misogynistic beauty standards are certainly not.

While it is enticing to believe that personal moral uprightness will one day uplift you from the lower realm of misogyny into a heaven free from unrealistic body standards, that's a fucking stupid idea and not how the real world works at all.

"Women being pressured to uphold X beauty standard" is not affected at all by whether or not you decide to do X on a personal level. It is simply a descriptor for how you have less social value if you don't.

To put it crudely, under misogynistic beauty standards, you can't "ugly" or "pretty" your way into "being valued while ugly". You can only "ugly" your way into "being less valued", and "pretty" your way into "being more valued". No amount of moving within a system will make you free of it.

People like to frame systemic issues as personal responsibilities, because personal responsibilities are small things that can be solved by the individual. It gives people the illusion of control (and someone to blame). However, systemic inequality is not addressed by sitting at home alone and letting your pubes grow. Neither is it addressed by saying mean shit to strangers for living under those same pressures as everyone else (crabs-in-a-bucket mentality). These are both bitch-ass measures that soothe the ego, but don't actually incite real change.

Systemic change is caused by challenging how you and other people perceive people under the systems of inequality, maintaining the active conversation about inequality, and addressing inequality through action. Things like making more people conscientious of biases in how you and other people are treated for not adhering to the established social rule, and speaking out to protect undervalued people in areas where you actually do have social power.

So when a conversation about systemic pressure (Ex:"Women should be allowed to abstain from shaving their legs") has dozens of responses of "I shave my legs🥺🥺🥺 am I a bad person? 🥺🥺🥺", that is dozens of people completely missing the point.

If instead of worrying about their own shaved legs, they spoke up the next time they heard someone without shaved legs get called "gross" or "lazy", maybe we might be getting somewhere.

[shyocean]

When a topic like this has dozens of responses in the notes where people are like, "you see, you are actually a bad person," that is also a lot of people missing the point.

See this post's notes.

When someone responds to topics like this with, hey, "am I a bad person, I don't want to be a sinner", you can respond with, "no, this is a systemic issue. It's unjust to blame people who are trying to survive systems of inequality for the horrific conditions through which they try to survive. Your complicated relationship to [x thing] is part of a system and structure that harms everyone. Don't hate yourself, don't judge other people either, kill the cop in your head first."

When someone says, "yeah, you need to be better! I enjoy ensuring the left is morally pure and exporting guilt!" it's a bit more tricky to find a way to connect people with what is useful.

Systemic change begins to occur when we unlearn cultural patterns of guilt, harm, and extraction. As long as people are still playing king of the mountain, they are still enacting the same pattern-- same OS different skin.

We are all living in the system that hurts us. We all have to survive it. It is not irrational to respond to hurt in a way that protects yourself.

It is not irrational to want to be loved or likable--rather, it is one of the most basic human drives.

It is not irrational to seek power through shaming others for not conforming to your politics: that behavior is extensively modelled and hard to unlearn.

There are simply better, more effective ways to respond.

It's irrational to think you are genuinely going to free yourself of the dominant hegemonic system that is encoded into your language, culture, institutions, and science, without having to learn how to negotiate from within it. Hopeful, but irrational.

[toonscallop]

You really are stuck on my use of the word "irrational," huh? It might make sense to you, outside observer, that people are acting that way in response to these kinds of posts described by OP, but that doesnt mean they are responding rationally. An action being understandable or sympathetic and an action being irrational are not mutually exclusive.

When people are responding to something emotionally or by lashing out reflexively, are not motivated by reasoning and are not responding by addressing the current situation, their actions are irrational. Someone acting on habit or according to a practiced behavior without reflecting or reasoning is acting irrationally.

The line of thinking "this post made me feel guilty for X beauty standard and its OP's fault" is irrational. People who are clearly pulling in responses and rebuttals to the conversations they wish they were having instead of the one they are actually having with OP up there, are also not thinking clearly about what they are doing and who they are actually talking to. Having war flashbacks to back when you were in the online trenches arguing about shaving your pits is not rational thinking.

Again, this is a post about post responses. Not an actual example of the post being described. People are acting like it is the latter and turning themselves into examples of the people criticized of their own volition. If you think these replies aren't irrational, then I guess rationality is now a civil partner to the poorest of reading comprehension.

IMO telling people they being irrational is an important part of this. It is easy to have a hostile gut reaction and assume there is a reasoned truth behind your response, when the reality is you felt hurt and lashed out at someone, like a child. Actions like that are understandable, but not rational and dont need to be validated by others. A grown ass person's responsibility for emotionally regulating themselves does not need to be turned into a community issue.

[strawberry-crocodile]

for real tho it feels exhausting that ive seen this whole "woman should be allowed to abstain from X beauty standard" -> "i perform X beauty standard, am i evil? do you think im evil? please forgive me i came up with a dozen excuses 🥺" since like 2015 (and i know its been going on longer than that) like girl thats not the poiiiiint

[strawberry-crocodile]

look me in the eyes. repeat after me. "i face societal pressure to perform this beauty standard. i should not face that pressure. i conform to this standard. i am rewarded for performing to this standard. i need to respect women who do not perform this standard. this is not about whether or not i am a sinner for wearing makeup."

[shyocean]

This is all true. But also, people are not acting irrationally when they respond defensively .

Getting called a sinner, or a scab or strikebreaker, or a collaborator, or being accused of breaking ranks or harming other women is pretty standard from the left. People policing ideological purity, people who resent anyone with more privilege, etc.

And they are also hammered from the right.

In fact, I can easily point to so many narratives where the villain is an aging woman trying to stay beautiful and/or retain power. Misogyny really does villainize women who try to conform to beauty standards unnaturally in order to maintain access to social standing.

There's an intuitive contempt for the intelligence and morality of beautiful women from both sides. I think of that painting of a naked woman looking in a mirror called Vanity, which judges the mafe up woman, not the painter, audiencevor social system.

Women who are older, fatter, or otherwise outside of the standard who took obvious steps are especially hard hit.

So it's really important to repeat. You are not a sinner.

And the system is hurting you and everyone else.

These are both true.

[toonscallop]

OK, here's the Real Important Thing: People who react defensively when posed with X topic and people who name-call in response are both acting irrationally (or selfishly, or stupidly, or childishly, take your pick), because they are derailing a discussion of systemic pressures to one that re-frames misogynistic beauty standards as a problem of personal responsibility, which misogynistic beauty standards are certainly not.

While it is enticing to believe that personal moral uprightness will one day uplift you from the lower realm of misogyny into a heaven free from unrealistic body standards, that's a fucking stupid idea and not how the real world works at all.

"Women being pressured to uphold X beauty standard" is not affected at all by whether or not you decide to do X on a personal level. It is simply a descriptor for how you have less social value if you don't.

To put it crudely, under misogynistic beauty standards, you can't "ugly" or "pretty" your way into "being valued while ugly". You can only "ugly" your way into "being less valued", and "pretty" your way into "being more valued". No amount of moving within a system will make you free of it.

People like to frame systemic issues as personal responsibilities, because personal responsibilities are small things that can be solved by the individual. It gives people the illusion of control (and someone to blame). However, systemic inequality is not addressed by sitting at home alone and letting your pubes grow. Neither is it addressed by saying mean shit to strangers for living under those same pressures as everyone else (crabs-in-a-bucket mentality). These are both bitch-ass measures that soothe the ego, but don't actually incite real change.

Systemic change is caused by challenging how you and other people perceive people under the systems of inequality, maintaining the active conversation about inequality, and addressing inequality through action. Things like making more people conscientious of biases in how you and other people are treated for not adhering to the established social rule, and speaking out to protect undervalued people in areas where you actually do have social power.

So when a conversation about systemic pressure (Ex:"Women should be allowed to abstain from shaving their legs") has dozens of responses of "I shave my legs🥺🥺🥺 am I a bad person? 🥺🥺🥺", that is dozens of people completely missing the point.

If instead of worrying about their own shaved legs, they spoke up the next time they heard someone without shaved legs get called "gross" or "lazy", maybe we might be getting somewhere.

[bogleech]

...I pop back onto Tumblr only to discover that someone who was also following me for years has been bombarding gooseworx's comments with accusations of real life abusiveness because she made a cartoon guy who plays video games too rudely.

I feel even less like picking up tumblr again

[toonscallop]

Interviews with writers.

This person is a nightmare version of the interviewer in this tiktok.

[frog-on-top-of-a-log]

I don’t get why you would ever change a characters name in the dubbed version of a show. Especially if it is basically the original but a little to the left.

It recently watched a single episode of one piece in German and they call luffy “ruffy” for no good reason. That isn’t even a German name. They also replaced ussop with “lisop”. The others all stayed the same.

Why?

What purpose does that serve?

[toonscallop]

The reason for that is early localization. There is no standard Japanese -> Latin Alphabet translation, and in places where there are, it still might conflict with authorial intent. Unless the authorial intent is known, most localization makes an educated guess and hopes for the best.

In early localization of One Piece, Ruffy/Luffy and Zoro/Zolo were common mix-ups before the official English spellings became standard because the Japanese could be read either way. If the dub started with "Ruffy" they might elect to just continue with that for the sake of consistency, even though authorial intent is that it is supposed to be Luffy.

Also, characters names have meaning in the original Japanese. The "uso" in Usopp's name is literally the Japanese word for "lie". So "Lie-sopp" or "Lüge-sopp" would be a complete literal translation of his name that preserves what Japanese-speaking audiences hear.

A lot of later translation retroactively corrects this. One Piece started in the late 90s when a lot of anime localization was new/niche and people still didn't really have a good idea of how much to preserve and how much to change for the sake of non-Japanese audience understanding.

[animentality]

[weaselle]

Whenever I think about the value of something being done by a person who really understands the job from a lifetime of experience, I think of my first restaurant job. My goal was to work every position, and I started with a year and a half in the dish pit at 16yo.

When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.

He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.

But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.

That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.

The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said

"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"

we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight

Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.

Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:

and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever

"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.

If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.

[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]

160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.

And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.

For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."

The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.

It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career

Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.

But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.

But I've thought about Claudio and what i learned from him many MANY times in my life.

[marisolinspades]

All of this. Disaster befalls any company that holds no regard for the expertise of the lowest level staff.

In my younger years I worked at a medical office that managed both mental health and addiction recovery. The company had purchased an empty lot down the road from the building we rented to build a better facility with larger capacity. The CEO worked for months with the architect, and just as they were finalizing everything they happened to let me - who was the receptionist at that time - take a gander at the blueprints. It took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out at me.

“The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout.” I said. “It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall.”

“Is that important?” They asked.

“Do you want me to be able to keep track of the patients who are waiting?” I asked.

“Isn’t that what the sign-in sheet is for?” They asked me.

“Not everyone who comes here is signing in for an appointment, some are coming to check in, some people are here for the group therapy and need to be directed to the other side of the building, some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach.” I explain.

“How often does that even happen?” They asked.

“Every day.” I explain.

“Bullshit.” They said.

“I’m not joking at all. Also, where is the chart room?” I asked.

“Oh, over here.” They said, pointing to a tiny closet on the far side of the building from the receptionist and check out desks. It was tucked neatly beside the CEO’s office. To get there the secretaries would have to go through two sets of security doors and it would be a five minute walk each way.

“Why isn’t it next to the front office, since that’s where the people who use it are?” I asked.

“We had concerns about people just going into the chart room to goof off and not do their work. It takes them away from their desks too much. You should only go in the chart room twice a day - once in the morning to pull the charts for the day, and once in the evening to put way the charts. It would remain locked and the CEO would have the key and let you in to supervise.” They said.

“We pull charts the day before so everything is ready to go and we can alert staff if a patient with additional needs is coming in. We have to go in the chart room every time a patient calls in that’s having a problem with their meds or is in crisis or otherwise has a question for the nurse. We have to go in there every time someone cancels and we are able to fit a waitlisted patient in. We go in there 20 - 30 times a day for legitimate reasons. The only reason any of us has ever gone in there to take a minute was when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time.”

They stared at me.

“Sit with me for an hour and see what happens up here.” I said.

They took the blueprints away from me before I could keep looking at them, but they took me up on sitting with me. They didn’t last an hour. They changed the blueprints to fix both things I’d pointed out.

Unfortunately, they didn’t let me keep looking at it and they never asked the janitor what he thought, so no one caught the final fatal flaw in the design.

There were no closets in the entire building. Nowhere to put our supplies. And I’m not talking just a place for stationary and pens. I mean no janitorial closet. Nowhere to put paper towels and toilet paper or cleaning products. Nowhere to put holiday decorations or anything at all. They completely forgot about storage of any kind and immediately started eyeballing my hard-won chart room for it.

They wound up putting all the supplies in the cabinets under the sinks in the public bathrooms. And, surprising to no one, all of it got stolen after our first week in the new building. All our spare keyboards and monitors and phones and even our paper towels just walked out of the building. Because the CEO who had never worked a lower level job in his life wasn’t convinced closets were worth it.

[cassandratongue]

Hate to be that guy but I do think one of the reasons they tried to change how reblogging works is because they've also noticed how dire the reblog situation is, and I just want to remind y'all that this is the reblog website, they're rolling back the change because we LIKE how reblogs already work. Maybe in order to show them that we should actually reblog shit?

[toonscallop]

No. It is the job of the developer to identify the points of friction in their system and remove them. The reason why Tumblr rolled back the change was because their solution sucked and broke Reblogs instead of encouraging people to use them. If they want people to Reblog more than they do now, they should make Reblogs better. Or if people prefer Likes more, Tumblr should figure out why, and make Likes contribute to spreading posts somehow. Telling users they should use Reblogs when Reblogs don't serve their intentions won't fix anything. Subpar functionality won't be fixed by a call to action. If the problem with "Ratios" is that Reblogs are more important than Likes, you can either make Reblogging more appealing (which is what Tumblr tried and failed to do) or you can make Likes less useless.

From my own understanding, people use Likes when users enjoy a post but don't want it attributed to any of their own blogs. "Just Reblog more" isn't a good solution because what the user wants is specifically not a Reblog. Having Likes more visibly contribute to increased post traffic without attributing that Like to any blog would solve this. Then people wouldn't think of Likes as empty attention.

[tumblr]

Reblogs in a chain now get their own notes

The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve. 

Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.

If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.

Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.

This is just the beginning. More changes are coming as we keep building this out – stay tuned!

[toonscallop]

Run a social media website

Remove ability to communicate

???????

?????

There are so many broken features on this website and your big plan was to break the one thing that actually works?

[liarsblade]

More and more I'm beginning to suspect that a not totally insignificant number of people are just straight up not listening when female characters talk.

[liarsblade]

And I mean this in a very literal sense. Like I'm not just now learning about misogyny or anything, I've always generally understood that people "don't listen" (in a broad sense, as in don't give the same weight to their words as men's, as in are so deeply dismissive of what they're saying that the information is not retained, as in do not active listen, etc) when women talk, and this extends of course to female fictional characters to some degree. But I'm saying that it's worse than that even. Like they are physically not hearing female characters. I genuinely think that some people, whether they realize it or not, are clicking faster through female video game character's dialogues, are pulling out their phones during female character's scenes, hell are maybe even leaving the room entirely during female character-centric plotlines, treating them functionally as commercial breaks, down moments where you get up to get a drink or see what the cat is doing in the next room and you don't pause because you won't miss much. I just read a lot of takes where there is really no other possible explanation. And it haunts me.

[toonscallop]

I've looked at reviews for lesser-known games with women voice-over and have read outlier reviews saying they "hate the annoying female" so there's an unfiltered portion of people out there who have directly identified their own aversion to feminine voices.

[ivy-michaels]

Honestly, the MCU has been a cursed object from the word "go."

The first movie has Tony Stark icing, like, 30 dudes, with methods as varied as "Hitting him so hard his spine snaps" to "just blowing him the fuck up with a tiny missile."

But like they're all fantasy al-Qaeda so apparently its chill to just wantonly murder a bunch of Afghan dudes in Afghanistan in a kids' movie.

[ivy-michaels]

Like, I don't want to get all violence-in-media on people but also it's kind of distressing to me that we have an entire generation raised on movies where the superheroes straight-up kill people all the fuckin time.

I grew up with the cartoons of X-Men, Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man, all of which made "no killing people" a central part of their identity. It was more than just appeasing censors. It was the deep, profound belief that there were ways to solve seemingly any problem without bloodshed.

But i suppose all that goes out the window when you're making a hundred-million-dollar blockbuster and you want to ask the USAF for a fighter jet.

[itsabear]

Not all violence in media but who gets to do the violence, how do they get to do the violence, what's the risk of doing the violence? Tony has no need to kill anyone, especially in the later half of the film. He is in an invulnerable suit of armour that ignores tank shells. He always has the choice to not kill. There's definitely a politics to it.

[toonscallop]

I see your "there is a politics to Iron Man (2008)," and raise you a "OH BOY, IS THERE."

I think an important part of this discussion that hasn't been discussed extensively is that Iron Man (2008) released at the end of George W. Bush's presidency, partway through the War on Terror, well into the Iraq War, before Osama bin Laden was found and killed, and into the most aggressively pro-torture, pro-military, anti-Muslim eras of USA media. Much of American media at the time for almost a decade was hyper-violent, and/or highly nationalistic, and/or revenge fantasies against Muslims/unspecified Terrorists. The "Middle East is evil" was not just racist screed, but government policy.

By the time Iron Man (2008) had come out the USA had been so inundated from imagery of terrorism imagery and USA military imagery which centers the conflict in the Middle East from both fiction and real life news media that that the general response to this image was recognition, not shock.

This is all to say that the thesis of Iron Man (2008); that conflict in the Middle East is perpetuated by USA war profiteering and that the heads of technology should take responsibility for the harm their technology causes, in context, could be considered counterculture. Other then-progressive gems include Tony Stark refusing to sell weapons and pivoting his company into solving the energy crisis, and Ho Yinsen, his benevolent mentor-doctor, being re-adapted from Asian to Afghan, sub-textually suggesting that Afghan people are actually human beings (wow!) capable of benevolence and maybe deserving of protection from violence (through violence!).

It should be noted that the scene where Tony Stark massacres militants in Afghanistan in context is Tony Stark getting revenge on his and Yinsen's kidnappers and freeing Yinsen's home village in Afghanistan from terrorist occupation. Cut for the movie trailers, it just looks like Iron Man killing members of Al-Qaeda

So, bizarrely, I posit that Iron Man (2008) is actually a deescalation of violence for the time it was made in. This is despite the fact that it doesn't question American military exceptionalism, does not question the then-popular narrative of Afghanistan insurgents as the enemies of America, and does not have a less-than-typical amount of actual violent content for a 2008 action film.

There is no such thing as timeless media, and the reason for violence in media is often violence in real life. I think, to understand a film, it is important to understand the culture that a film was made for. Understanding the popular politics at the time a MCU movie came out is far more important to understanding the film than watching every movie and TV show set in its cinematic universe. You can't really understand Iron Man (2008) without the context of the War on Terror, any more than you can understand the original Iron Man (and its egregious Orientalism) without the context of the Vietnam War.

So, Iron Man (2008) is the way that it is because it was made for the USA of 2008; a public discontent from 5 years of a seemingly pointless war overseas in Iraq and having yet to gain any closure from the attacks on 9/11 attributed to Afghanistan insurgents.

Similarly, the reason why Superman (2025) is so tonally and philosophically different from Iron Man (2008), or even Man of Steel (2013), is because it was made for an American public experiencing what I would call "cruelty fatigue" as decades of cynicism in media and real life is finally taking its toll.

Speaking of DC, what were they up to in 2008?

The Dark Knight (2008)

Christian Bale in The Dark Knight (2008)

The year 2008 was also the release year of the widely-beloved Dark Knight, a movie that could be argued is darker in tone than Iron Man (2008), despite the fact that its hero is against (directly) killing any of his enemies (Let's not talk about Ra's Al Ghul in Batman Begins (2005) for now). The movie re-imagines the Joker as a bomb-planting criminal super-terrorist who claims that his main goal is to spread chaos.

In order to take down criminals, Batman crosses multiple lines including but not limited to:

Extra-judicially extraditing a foreign criminal hiding across international borders. Batman tracks down a businessman from Hong Kong and brings him back to Gotham to be prosecuted. USA intervention across borders is common enough in American media throughout the century that this is not emblematic of the era's politics by itself, but...

Placing Gotham under a mass surveillance network made out of collecting cell phone data in order to track down the Joker. This is literally a provision of the Patriot Act. It should be noted that the film admits that Batman's actions are unethical, but does not have a firm conclusion on whether it was wrong to do so in response to the Joker.

Uses interrogative torture as a tool for counter-terrorism. The most meme'd scene from the movie ("WHERE ARE THEY?!") is Batman being allowed by the GCPD to brutalize the Joker (currently in police custody) to get the location of his kidnapped victims. Batman is successful in getting the location because Batman rushing to rescue the hostages is part of the Joker's ultimate plan, but that doesn't change the fact that Batman frequently uses interrogative torture and it appears to have a 100% information-get success rate for him. The rate of success by itself is a political statement on the efficacy of interrogative torture. Interrogative torture was a popular topic of discussion in the years proceeding 2008 for reasons. There was also a general shift in the 2000s of heroic characters relying on interrogative torture that didn't exist in the same way in the decades prior, and actually ended up influencing government policy regarding torture. An honorable mention goes out to the crunchy-snap of Sal Maroni's legs.

Intentionally or not, this film is also a laundry list of mirrored political talking points from the War on Terror. I don't think the choices in these films are all intentional political statements on then-current politics by the filmmakers, but I think the discussions in politics of the time was so ubiquitous that it was impossible to avoid the shift it made in popular media.

So yeah. If you're a fan of superhero media, you are never going to get media that reflects your politics perfectly, or media that isn't colored by the politics of its time.

[mollyjames]

If you've ever thought to yourself "I basically know who this person is" about a stranger from reading their posts or watching their youtube videos, I guarantee you're wrong. Yes, even if you've been following them for a long time. Knock it off.

[ajaxgb]

It's possible to know a fictional character purely from the little vignettes in a story because the author has intentionally structured those moments to show every relevant facet of the character. If you finish a story, and there were two scenes where the character was nice and one where they liked rollercoasters, then that's the character! They are nice and they like rollercoasters.

REAL PEOPLE DO NOT WORK LIKE THIS.

Real people posting on social media may appear somewhat similar to a fictional character being revealed scene by scene. DO NOT FALL FOR IT. You are not being shown a curated collection of carefully authored scenes that intentionally build up to a full character! You are seeing a random assortment of moments when the person felt like posting on social media, filtered through imprecise wording, missing context, whether the person slept well the night before, and who knows how many other factors. Real people are orders of magnitude more complicated than fictional characters because they are not designed to be easily understood by an audience! If you try to interpret social media posts as a found-footage story it will lead only to ruin!

[toonscallop]

I feel like people who believe in body language experts are falling into the same trap as this as taking too many cues from creative works. Actors in movies are deliberately emphasizing certain behaviours and body movements to communicate the internal thoughts of their characters to an outside viewer. Real people in real life do not do this. There could be hundreds of completely non-dramatic reasons for why a stranger in an interview sniffed or fidgeted or scratched their arm or broke eye contact. The belief that body language can be read cleanly and interrogated is an excuse that results in a lot of neurodivergent people or people with uncommon body language getting harassed or accused.

[jameelaillustration]

Honestly, the protagonist I wish we'd gotten in Nosferatu

[toonscallop]

That movie already exists and it's The Invitation (2022).

[liberalsarecool]

Republican policies and misogynistic rhetoric are killing the white birth rate.

White conservative single men are broken.

White conservative single women can't find a decent partner.

Republican lonerism is coming home to roost.

[toonscallop]

In 1800, the world population was 1 billion people. Today it is 9 billion. Even with a declining birth rate there are more people who exist in the last century than there have been in all of human history. Humans are no where near in danger of going extinct. We are the most populous mammal on the planet by far. Most animals can’t break 1 billion and the ones that do are domesticated. Anyone worried about human extinction in this century is fear-mongering.

[wolfertinger666]

there's something uncomfortable about western millennials/gen z's deep obsession with watering Studio Ghibli movies down into "wholesome bean comfort flicks aesthetic uwu japan" when half of these people completely miss the point of these films and the complex nuanced topics they deal with, especially when it comes to post war Japan.

[wolfertinger666]

i don't think these people watched princess mononoke.

i don't think that movie gives me comfort aesthetic vibes. at all.

[wolfertinger666]

✨ why does studio Ghibli food look so good ✨

[toonscallop]

Images from: https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/what-makes-ghibli-storytelling-so (From context, I imagine this is a stereotype that he wanted to avoid from his Japanese audience as well.)