does anyone have that picture of the mlm couple kissing with a wlw couple kissing on their shoulders I can’t find it

never mind I found it and it’s still adorable

if anyone else wants to see this

@our-queer-experience

Viola Davis at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival

This is it, the pinnacle of my contribution to fandom.

Bringing this back because it represents the True Nature of Steve Rogers

please remember you are writing fanfiction for fun. please remember you are writing fanfiction for fun. please remember you are writing fanfiction for fun. please remember you are writing fanfiction for fun. please remember you are writing fanfiction for fun. please remember you are writing fanfiction for fun. please remember you are writing fanfiction for fun. please remember you are writing fanfiction for fun

Tagged by @beatrice-otter for the five characters meme. So - five favourite characters and you vote on which one is your favourite!

Tagging (if you want/haven’t done): @shes-a-voodoo-child @theladyelizabeth @kawuli @mythopoetry @sherwoodknights

like i do get why the OT having characters describe the jedi as an 'ancient religion' when they were an active and significant political presence within living memory annoys people. but honestly i think making the fall of the jedi so recent just ramps up how idk. sinister the whole thing is to me?

like the Jedi weren't just wiped out physically; their memory has been flat out obliterated. let's not forget Palpatine didn't just have the Jedi order destroyed, he got the senate to cheer for him while he did it.

we live in an age of alternative facts - it's not difficult to imagine. oh you remember seeing the Jedi using the force live on space TV? no you didn't. the Jedi order is ancient history, they fell a really long time ago. 50 years? a hundred? something like that. we don't believe in that kind of superstition anymore. kinda sad that they're gone i guess but it was progress.

like 'the government massacres thousands of people including children and then 20 years later everyone acts like it didn't happen' isn't an implausible series of events c'mon

Also, a few thousand people across a whole inhabited galaxy is basically no one. And if they mostly interact with government or military officials, the vast majority of people would never meet a Jedi.

So even *before* the events of the prequels, the Jedi religion would be known largely through stories and to most people would already be just an "ancient religion".

You can see the same thing in real life even. With only 8 billion people on earth, there are religions with contemporary adherents, like Zoroastrianism and Samaritanism, that most people consider to just be "ancient".

Five of my Favorite Characters

@beatrice-otter tagged me for this game, thank you!

I'm using this as an opportunity to ramble about why these characters are among my favourites below the cut.

But first I'm tagging: @hermitknut, @bumblebee-and-tea, @caffeespresso, @freizusein, @shakespearerants, @biacetenebrae and @cleargreyskies. Anyone who wants to do this, feel free!

Javert is NOT a rich white cop, he's a poor Romani man born inside a jail. When I first joined the Les Mis fandom about a decade ago I remember there were a lot of people who made Javert a rich white policeman. Which, hey, I do kinda get it, especially when you're contrasting Javert to characters like Valjean or Les Amis. I totally get why people would want that story to exist within Les Mis fanworks. But also, that is not Javert whatsoever. He's canonically half Romani, born in a prison.

Javert being a class traitor actually means so much more to the story than Javert being some random privileged asshole pig.

#even today cops pull mainly from the poor#because it's actually a pretty shitty job for the most part#in javert's day they were considered#a part of the criminal class#dogs that had been taught to hunt wolves sort of thing

“Javert had been born in prison, of a fortune teller, whose husband was in the galleys. As he grew up, he thought that he was outside the pale of society, and he despaired of ever re-entering it. He observed that society unpardonably excludes two classes of men - those who attack it and those who guard it; he had no choice except between these two classes….”

Les Miserables 1.5.5 Vague flashes on the horizon

We need to recognize the collective trauma disabled people went through and are still going through with covid when everyone around us told us that our lives were less important than their convenience. That "only the sick and elderly will die so why should I do anything differently?"

I lost my faith in humanity at that point and I don't think I'll ever be able to get it back.

I was told to my face by a medical professional that I shouldn’t expect to receive life saving treatment if I got covid because my severe disability puts me at the bottom of the queue even in cases where my survival chances were identical with others.

Disabled people have been repeatedly told that our lives aren’t worth saving, and that sticks.

The brain does not magically mature at 25. Actual neuroscientists note some 8-year-olds even have a greater "maturation index" than 25-year-olds. The myth misunderstands basic neuroscience but is still used for anti-trans policymaking like the Cass Report. https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/brain-development-25-year-old-mature-myth.html

I would really recommend that ppl read "The Mismeasure of Man" for a history of how shaky pseudoscience was often used to confirm social prejudices.

The 25 thing will be remembered alongside the "ape-like features of non-europeans", "criminal stigmata", the "missing ounces of the female brain" and the "average american's mental age of 12" (that time IQ tests were misrepresented as a measure of general intelligence to prove it was impossible to educate the working class.. a patently silly claim now that many countries have near-universal literacy.)

It's no coincidence that all this stuff is suddenly appearing at a time when younger ppl are kept from meeting typical milestones by a mix of helicopter parenting & a shitty economy

Neuroimaging is in its infancy. Just look at all those reports of "gender differences" that magically disappear with larger sample sizes.

You know what? Happy Disability Month to those who were disabled by accident. Cars, skis, ice, sand, rocks, horses, just plain bad luck. Broken bones and backs that never heal. Shoulders that can't lift or move right. Wrists that don't turn. Hands that can't grasp. Brains that don't work right anymore. Legs that don't move anymore and eyes that won't recover.

The shame, the blame, the frustration, the wishful thinking that tears you apart. The beauty of small victories and simple kindness. The community you build. Reshaping a life with no warning. Mourning for the person you once were. Joyfully embracing the person you now are. Happy Disability Month to you too (even if you aren't ready to use that word yet)

“He’s really not dead as long as we remember him”

The first picture that Leonard Nimoy (Spock) took with his first camera (on his grandfather). That’s how his photography career started

One of my favorite things is modern adaptations that leave people with the same careers they had in the original material, because unless you’re a cop or a doctor that practically never happens.

Irene Adler’s an opera singer. We still have those! They don’t have the same subtext exactly, but nothing is going to because we aren’t the Victorians. She could continue to be an opera singer. I have never seen this happen.

Jonathan Harker can still be in real estate. That’s a job people have. A modern story that still involves Dracula contacting his firm to help him purchase property sounds amazing actually.

A modern adaptation of Dracula where you keep seeing Jonathan Harker’s face on bus stop bench ads for his realtor office.

#“This client doesn’t seem to exist online; a bit strange. But he’s elderly so it’s not that unusual” -Jonathan about to make a mistake – @capslockdoesntexpressmyjoy

I was about to joke about Quincey Morris still being a cowboy, but then it occurred to me that he’s not actually a cowboy in the source material, is he? He’s the wealthy heir of a Texas ranch-owning family who just acts like an Old West cowboy. If anything, that’s even more plausible today than it was in 1897.

Dracula researched england and planned his arrival there quite thoroughly tho. If anything he WOULD be on social media and he would have several profiles he’s been curating meticulously for the last twenty years. The “recluse in an abandoned castle” part I think is because all of his main and all his sockpuppet accounts would be livejournals

So yeah good point, the modern equivalent of lounging ostentatiously while reading a train schedule would be pointedly lounging whilst deeply absorbed in his phone.

Whose browser is open to the train schedule.

Was at a restaurant recently where they'd converted both their bathrooms to gender neutral (nice) and as i was washing my hands a guy came out a stall and saw me & said, "Oh!!! my god!! Is this the ladies'?? 😨😨😨😨 I'm so sorry!!!!!!" and I was like "No, it's fine, it's gender neutral" and he goes ".......Oh. uh. Ok." And then walks straight out. without washing his hands.

Sir. You need to be less embarrassed about hypothetically crossing some arbitrary gender barrier and more embarrassed about getting your Peepee DooDoo Shit Hands all over this fucking RESTAURANT

"Separate bathrooms are unnecessary" false. Actually we need every building to have TWO gender neutral restrooms, one for People Who Wash Their Fucking Hands and the other for people who don't, which is actually just a door leading to a 10ft pit with scorpions at the bottom. And also a mandatory power point presentation on disease vectors

hey I'm trying to figure out what i wanna watch and it occurred to me, are there any genre (scifi/fantasy esp tho i could do mystery/thriller maybe?) tv shows with jews as main characters? the only time i can think of that it came up in a major (ish) show was Susan Ivanova sitting shiva for her father on B5. But admittedly it wasn't a type of representation I was personally invested in until recently. But, idk, lots of vampire stuff has Catholicism all over, Expanse dreamed up space Mormons (admittedly this is not necessarily flattering rep for Mormons), am I gonna find Jews in Space outside of a punchline in a Mel Brooks movie?

"It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6 or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians and, although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you."

`-James Baldwin, speaking for the proposition that ‘The American Dream is at the expense of the American Negro’ Cambridge Union, England, 17 February 1965

huh. this is maybe an obvious thought given how fear and anger are two of the driving emotions that MB's comfortable with, throughout the series, but now that I'm rereading its first meeting with ART in Artificial Condition, I'm struck by how much of a recurring theme that fear is.

I think after MB opens up about Ganaka Pit, there are fewer direct references to fear, at least between MB and ART. (Though I freely admit I was skimming by then.) Something there about vulnerability leading to intimacy, perhaps. But also an unsurprising theme considering this is the book with Tapan's titledrop line about "Fear is an artificial condition."

people who probably know what they're doing edition

people who aren't experts version here