Rosa Centifolia Rosier de Provence (detail), Pierre-Joseph Redouté (French, 1759–1840)
Watching this (and fearing broken ankles with each loop) I can’t helping thinking about that old quote Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, except backwards and in high heels.
aprilsvigil
But no, if you watch closely you’ll see she doesn’t even step on the last chair. That means she had to trust that fucker to lift her gently to the ground while he was spinning down onto that chair. That takes major guts. I’d be pissing myself and fearing a broken neck if I were in her place. Kudos to her.
pleasant-trees
I can’t stop watching this.
Whoa.
Okay so this is true, but a tiny part of a wider truth.
Ginger Rogers was a FUCKING BADASS. Ignore for a sec the rampant sexism in Hollywood (they once bleached her hair blonde in wardrobe without telling her beforehand), the fact that she fought her whole career against typecasting and stereotyping from fellow actors (Katharine Hepburn famously said of the Astaire/Rogers partnership “she gave him sex. He gave her class” ) for starting out in musicals, and went on to have a career lasting over fifty years, winning a Best Actress Oscar (Kitty Foyle, 1940). But… JUST focusing on the Astaire movies…
Not only did she dance “backwards” in high heels, the dances were a task in themselves. Astaire was an absolute perfectionist and choreographed for himself, so as a younger, less experienced dancer Rogers came in at a disadvantage and worked her ass off to match him.
Then there’s the filming complications… these numbers were filmed in ONE TAKE. So one thing goes wrong and you have to start over. Maybe you make a mistake or maybe your dress flies up because…
Ginger had to contend with her wardrobe. Dancing in heels is the norm at this time, but dancing in a dress designed for cinema cameras… not so much. They were heavy, embellished, uncomfortable, restrictive and cumbersome and essentially a third member of the dance, strapped to the body of one partner.Not only did she have to dance and look good, she had to control the dress too!
Take this routine from Swing Time… (it gets going proper at 1:30ish)
This dress has weights, YES WEIGHTS, sewn in to the hem to make it fly out and create a visual effect. So it’s heavy, it hurts if it hits you, and your partner gets mad if it hits him. So you gotta control it.
Well it turns out all these factors on this set, this particular day aren’t going so well. So you’re doing take after take, here’s no labour laws, so at 4am after 18 hours you’re still going, even though part of the routine requires you to spin up those curved stairs with no rail at high speed….
Okay so now back to those high heels. In Ginger’s autobiography she vividly remembers this night as the night she bled though her shoes. They did so many takes, her feet blistered, bled, and the white satin high heels she was wearing finished he night pink because they were literally full of blood. And still they keep shooting. She keeps dancing.
The take they use in the film is the last. Early hours. Bloody feet. And she spins, acts and bosses out until that last second. Because she was that professional, talented and bloody minded. This is the last set of spins…
So I say once again. Ginger Rogers was a badass.
She did everything Fred Astaire did backwards, in high heels, wearing a 20 pound dress, exhausted, injured and standing in a pool of her own blood. And watching her perform, you would never know.
This is why I despise Hollywood, I love a lot of the women (and certain men) of Hollywood Bc they tend to work so fucking hard (obv excluding certain people Bc they’re toxic) but I hate the industry itself because it makes them do shit like this, not to this extent anymore but if you’re willing to make someone do something like that then you’re literal trash.
How do I tell people that sometimes if you turn your shipping brain off you can interact with media better
Like I hate to say it but if you can’t engage with any media without descending into full-on fandom-style shipping at the expense of the themes, characterization, non-romantic relationships, and general content of the work. You might need to take a step back from shipping and maybe fandom in general. (Also to the people in the notes of this post who are acting like I said shipping in general is terrible: What this post is saying is that if you interact with all media exclusively through a shipping lens you miss a lot of stuff. I’m not saying don’t ship things, I’m saying use your critical thinking skills.)
“There’s more to media than romantic relationships” should not be a take which causes so much anger, and yet
I thought this was my hometown for a second
So this has actually been cited by academics as part of the major draw to online spaces is the fact that just existing in public is reacted to with hostility and punishment. Gretchen McCulloch discussed this is in her book Because Internet, citing research that shows teens and young adults want to be outside! We want to spend time in social places, it’s just that there aren’t any places to exist in public without being charged for it.
When I was homeless as a kid my little brother and I loved to go to the library. We would keep warm in there reading good books all day long. Until residents of the town complained about us “loitering” at the library each day. The library staff then told us we were no longer allowed to stay more than an hour at a time. Imagine seeing two homeless children spending their entire days quietly reading just to keep out of the cold and having a damn problem with it.
Here’s a relevant passage from Because Internet!
Even the fact that teens use all kinds of social networks at higher rates than twenty-somethings doesn’t necessarily mean that they prefer to hang out online. Studies consistently show that most teens would rather hang out with their friends in person. The reasons are telling: teens prefer offline interaction because it’s “more fun” and you “can understand what people mean better.” But suburban isolation, the hostility of malls and other public places to groups of loitering teenagers, and schedules packed with extracurriculars make these in-person hangouts difficult, so instead teens turn to whatever social site or app contains their friends (and not their parents). As danah boyd puts it, “Most teens aren’t addicted to social media; if anything, they’re addicted to each other.”
Just like the teens who whiled away hours in mall food courts or on landline telephones became adults who spent entirely reasonable amounts of time in malls and on phone calls, the amount of time that current teens spend on social media or their phones is not necessarily a harbinger of what they or we are all going to be doing in a decade. After all, adults have much better social options. They can go out, sans curfew, to bars, pubs, concerts, restaurants, clubs, and parties, or choose to stay in with friends, roommates, or romantic partners. Why, adults can even invite people over without parental permission and keep the bedroom door closed! (page 102-103)
The source I’d really recommend for lots more on this topic is It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by danah boyd, a highly readable ethnography spanning a decade of observation of how teens use social media. Here are a couple relevant excerpts:
I often heard parents complain that their children preferred computers to “real” people. Meanwhile, the teens I met repeatedly indicated that they would much rather get together with friends in person. A gap in perspective exists because teens and parents have different ideas of what sociality should look like. Whereas parents often highlighted the classroom, after-school activities, and prearranged in-home visits as opportunities for teens to gather with friends, teens were more interested in informal gatherings with broader groups of peers, free from adult surveillance. Many parents felt as though teens had plenty of social opportunities whereas the teens I met felt the opposite.
Today’s teenagers have less freedom to wander than any previous generation. Many middle-class teenagers once grew up with the option to “do whatever you please, but be home by dark.” While race, socioeconomic class, and urban and suburban localities shaped particular dynamics of childhood, walking or bicycling to school was ordinary, and gathering with friends in public or commercial places—parks, malls, diners, parking lots, and so on—was commonplace. Until fears about “latchkey kids” emerged in the 1980s, it was normal for children, tweens, and teenagers to be alone. It was also common for youth in their preteen and early teenage years to take care of younger siblings and to earn their own money through paper routes, babysitting, and odd jobs before they could find work in more formal settings. Sneaking out of the house at night was not sanctioned, but it wasn’t rare either. (page 85-86)
From wealthy suburbs to small towns, teenagers reported that parental fear, lack of transportation options, and heavily structured lives restricted their ability to meet and hang out with their friends face to face. Even in urban environments, where public transportation presumably affords more freedom, teens talked about how their parents often forbade them from riding subways and buses out of fear. At home, teens grappled with lurking parents. The formal activities teens described were often so highly structured that they allowed little room for casual sociality. And even when parents gave teens some freedom, they found that their friends’ mobility was stifled by their parents. While parental restrictions and pressures are often well intended, they obliterate unstructured time and unintentionally position teen sociality as abnormal. This prompts teens to desperately—and, in some cases, sneakily—seek it out. As a result, many teens turn to what they see as the least common denominator: asynchronous social media, texting, and other mediated interactions. (page 90)
Anyway, more people need to read It’s Complicated, danah boyd really takes young people and technology seriously and doesn’t patronize or sensationalize, and it was a huge influence on me in figuring out the tone for Because Internet so I want to make sure it gets credit!
FUCK YOU DISNEY
Anyways, y’all better start saving your fave fanfics and fanart under the Disney labels cause it looks like they’re trying to curb fair use/fanworks and I’m sure there’s going to be mass panicked deletions even though it’s probably unnecessary cause AO3′s legal team will fight for us.
You know that 400K yall were so fucking mad about OTW raising? Yeah, its gonna pay for the travel expenses and court costs that the legal team at AO3/OTW when they protect your shit from getting C&Ded. DO NOT DELETE YOUR STUFF! IF YOU GET CONTACTED BY DISNEY - GO TO THE ORGANIZATION OF TRANSFORMATIVE WORKS , CONTACT THEIR LEGAL ADVOCACY DEPARTMENT! ASK FOR HELP!! THIS SHIT RIGHT HERE IS *WHY* *THEY* *EXIST*
Note that Disney would have one Hell of a time serving C&Ds to authors at AO3 - because there is no “contact author” option other than leaving a comment.
They’d have to contact the SITE, which is to say, the Organization for Transformative Works, to deliver a C&D order or a DMCA takedown order.
And the OTW is not going to remove fics because someone sent a letter that says “actually those characters belong to me and you can’t use them that way.” The OTW was created to FIGHT that kind of claim. They are ready.
Don’t delete your fics out of fear. WE OWN THE SERVERS. They can’t threaten the hosts into deleting anything.
And if Disney thought they had a strong legal case against fanfic, they’d’ve shut down the archive a decade ago, when it was penniless and unknown, instead of waiting until it had won several battles in Congress and got worldwide acclaim for a Hugo Award.
This is important!
This is why we say you aren’t allowed Patreon and Ko-Fi links on AO3. Because it gives these parasites their legal back door to fuck your shit up.
“Worldbuilding” is a very sophisticated word for the process of “YOOOOOO wouldn’t it be cool if...”
I hate how forgotten Rogue One is. It’s genuinely one of the best Star Wars movies to date. The lead characters all manage to stand out as individuals with stories of their own and the ending is an emotional roller coaster. This movie took a semi-plothole from way back in ANH and spun a story that enriched the franchise incredibly. R1 is how a “dark” SW movie should be done, taking a twist to the classic format and making it more grounded in the true perils of war while retaining the core messages of hope and (found) family.
Beauty and the Beast (1991) dir. Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise
morally grey does not mean “is bad but also sad”
a character that is morally grey will not burn the world down because it makes them feel powerful, they’ll do it because they perceive something about it to be broken. moral ambiguity has nothing to do with a character’s past, and everything to do with the relationship between their actions and their intentions.
Great distinction!
A character who does bad things because they’re sad, betrayed, or hurt by their circumstances may be sympathetic, but they aren’t necessarily morally grey.
A character becomes morally grey when there’s a sense of truth, goodness, or justice in their purpose, but the actions they take to achieve that purpose are troubling, even amoral.
psuedoscientist-deactivated2022
the biggest scam of all with the ao3 shit is people genuinely believing we NEED ao3 and ao3 alone.
the entire foundation ao3 is built on is one from past fic archives made to tailor to a certain demographic - harry potter fic authors were infamous for causing drama between fic archives, and this was only in the 90s/2000s. look at livejournal, ff.net, etc etc. ao3 has been lying to y'all for years into thinking there’s no better options for storing and sharing fic. we can do better than ao3, and we have before.
AO3 has never tried to convince anyone that it’s the only archive. There’s a lot of people who think it’s the best, including most of the active volunteers, but they don’t object to other archives.
AO3 hasn’t been “lying” to people to convince them there’s no better archives. More people post at FF.net and Wattpad than AO3; obviously, a lot of people think those are better. It’s likely more people post at Amino apps, although it’s hard to track those numbers.
OTW’s code is open source. Anyone who likes AO3’s structure but not policies, can make their own site. Or they can grab the pieces they like - the tag system, or the warnings structure, or the fandom label setup - and attach those to an entirely different fanwork hosting site.
For the people who do like AO3 - there aren’t any better sites. They’re the only ad-free fanwork hosting site. The only one that lets you search by tags across the whole archive. The only one that lets you download fic as ebooks to throw onto your ereader so you can read them offline. The only one that provides clear warnings for some kinds of content, and allows authors to tag for not-required content that they want to warn about. And of course, the only one that allows the full range of legal fannish content, rather than “the mods will decide if something is against the rules and throw it out, but not tell people exactly what those rules are, and not enforce it consistently.”
I am curious what was “better than AO3” before, and why it’s not being used now instead.
what the original post neglects to take into consideration is that yes, of course, there were archives before AO3. of course there were fanfic sites before AO3 that people loved and uploaded millions of words to and generated huge amounts of traffic.
and they’re gone!
they’re gone!
because whoever owned them lost interest, or sold off the company/domain/page, or was DDOSed, or targeted for mass reporting by people who think gay content is icky. that’s the point. that was the whole point of AO3, that it was something that would stick around and wasn’t subject to the whims of 3rd party content policies or revenue-based downsizing.
there’s a lot of subjectivity in what makes an archive good, why some people like x better than y or y better than z, but there’s one respect in which AO3 is undeniably superior to all its predecessors:
it’s still here.
I mean… yes, you can do better than ao3. you can. go ahead. as mentioned, the code is open-source! which means you can simply fork it- literally, go look on github at AO3’s repository, there’s a little “fork” button on top, so you can click on that and you get your own brand-new version of AO3.
then you can get a team of volunteer coders, use the exact same code if you want to, figure out how to wrangle and pay for server storage without the donations that y'all yell at AO3 for, figure out deploying a website of that size, figure out counters to the aforementioned DDOS problems and the massive legal issues that will come from people suing you for fanfic… your new AO3 clone can have your better tagging system and your banned fics or whatever. like. this is legal! it’s open-source code. go for it!
… do let me know how it goes
