Three Goblin Art
titsay
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macklin celebrini has autism
⁂
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Stranger Things
todays bird
shark vs the universe
Cosmic Funnies
Love Begins
izzy's playlists!
oozey mess
Claire Keane
will byers stan first human second
occasionally subtle
tannertan36
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
h
pixel skylines
seen from United States
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@waiting4morning
"The America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."
-Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country
Not to be a bitch but sometimes people engage with fiction in the most boring way possible, and nowhere is this clearer than in videogames. Like what you mean you hate a character just because they were kind of abrasive when speaking to the player character? "They were mean to me" and it didn't occur to you to wonder why? Like, what might their attitude toward you reveal about the world? About the social dynamics within it? About their own perspectives and backgrounds and personalities? Does it even occur you to ask? Would you only have liked them if they bowed to your presence and talked about how great you are? Like I'm sorry but you're so boring. How boring fiction would be if it cathered to you
Cats in grass, gouache (prints in shop 💌)
ancient greek word of the day: κακοθερής (kakotherēs), unfitted to endure summer heat
this literally means “bad at summer” pass it on
Reblog if you, too, are bad at summer
me: I should write
also me: let me play the scene in my head and fantasize about writing it instead
as a regular donor to Gaza Soup Kitchen I get their email updates, and they said today that while they've continued to be able to expand, donations are slowing down as Gaza gets less coverage. If you have a few dollars to spare, I encourage you to send them here to continue the amazing work that Hani and his team are doing.
“Like traditional casinos, online sportsbooks use a variety of mechanisms to entice gamblers in and then to keep them betting. They use deceptive advertising, claiming generous “average” payouts when in reality “just 1.3 percent of [daily fantasy sports] players were collecting 91% of prize money,” according to a McKinsey report cited by Funt. Like traditional casinos, they employ “VIP hosts” to cosset heavy hitters, and they lure big bettors with comped Super Bowl trips and other complimentary goodies. For more ordinary suckers, their strategies have become more refined. For example, they track your betting frequency, and when it declines, they bombard you with special offers and incentives to get you going again. They are becoming shockingly sophisticated users of mined personal data. Because sportsbook apps require that users activate geolocation on their devices (ostensibly to be sure that gambling is legal where players are), they can pinpoint exactly where a gambler is sitting in a ballpark and use seat prices to infer income and wealth information. An exec at a geodata firm speculates to Funt that they could soon pinpoint the type, and price, of the residences in which bettors live. And of course the pure seamlessness of the apps, the incredible ease of moving money from a bank account into the app, is an enormous incentive to compulsive behavior: the drugs, the dealer, and the ATM all in a single, handheld device. Americans placed $150 billion in bets in 2024, a number that has continued to rise. DraftKings alone has nearly four million monthly users.”
—
How Gambling Ate the World | The New Republic
I am so tired of this whole stupid industry and I hope it will be regulated, hard, at some point in my lifetime. This shit ruins lives.
"Just because I'm right, doesn't mean I'm being helpful" is a vastly underrated thought process that I strongly encourage others to get comfortable with
BAILEY’S 3K CELEBRATION —🔥(best of) + Luke Skywalker for @jediwill
“None of the stories people tell about me can change who I really am.” — Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, Matthew Stover
Byzantine mosaics found on the ceiling of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna, Italy.
I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.
Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”. The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.
And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA.
The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.
There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.
Other examples of “blamed for things their copycats did” include Watchmen (blamed for the gritty antihero comics of the 90s) and Madoka Magica (blamed for excessively edgy and grimdark magical girl shows).
Four years on, and I think you might be the first person to add this type of comment to this post. After receiving so many comments that are like “THG is nowhere near on the level of LotR” or “THG didn’t invent YA dystopia”, it’s so refreshing to see someone understand exactly what I meant by framing THG as “a work blamed for its copycats”, and expand on it with examples that I didn’t know about.
It’s so rare to get an original comment on this post. Thank you so much.
Jane Austen getting blamed for Pride & Prejudice copycats who both make Darcy worse and less reformed. Jane Austen told a beautiful story about mutual growth while others flatten it down into bantering enemies to lovers and sex pollen.
Maybe not exactly the same, but I feel like the imitations sometimes change people’s perceptions of the original too.
UNMUTE OMG
You can only drink the drink you get from this wheel for a month!
https://wheelofnames.com/uh3-8jf
how're you feeling?
Great!
okay, I could do it
okay, I couldn't do it
dead
horrible
im allergic/intolerant
Results
Sigh. At least I have this.
The tomb of a pastor's wife and stillborn child in a church in Hindelbank, Switzerland, 1751, depicting their resurrection.
@banana-with-a-bow-tie I agree with Citrus I’m sobbing thanks
Oh, a colleague of mine just wrote her PhD dissertation on this!
This is the Grave of Maria Magdalena Langhans by Johann August Nahl. Nahl was hosted by the pastor and his pregnant 28yo wife Maria Magdalena when she died during childbirth. Moved by this, he decided, by himself and without being commissioned to do so by anyone to make this grave for her. It became a huge place of pilgrimage for the next 150 years.
the worst thing about trying to give every jane austen protagonist a bad carbon copy of elizabeth bennet’s judgy wit
is that not even pride & prejudice thinks that behaviour of hers is entirely a good thing?
Like?? half of lizzy’s entire character arc is realizing that her judgy wit that she always congratulated herself on was based on really shaky foundations?? because she’s not nearly as good a judge of character as she believed, and that it’s actually kind of a character flaw motivated by the TITULAR combination of faults??? that she has as much pride & prejudice as she accuses others of having? & that she needs to let go of that a bit, in order to have better relationships with the people around her???
LIKE?
also this tends to cluster with not processing the contextual elements of the plot with enough attention to notice that Mr. Bennett is, in fact, Part Of The Problem.
because Lizzy over-developed those traits as part of deliberately being his daughter as much as possible and dissociating herself from her mother. but stepping outside the narrow context of their family where those are The Two Options reveals him as also embarrassingly flawed, and the terrible limitations of this approach to cultivating one's own character.
that's a big part of the story! some of the themes rather hinge on it!
