wild to think about the fact that, right now, as you read this, there’s a fandom server on discord having drama the likes of which we could not even fathom
ragabond
Highlights reel
Reblogging here for “no, you carry on above the misery”
Anonymous asked:
how do you reconcile with liking morally imprehensible content and problematic media?
i dont reconcile w anything bc i dont give a shit thanks for sending me this batshit ask tho
10 year old college humor sketch that i watched at 1am last night and have since watched five more times
generalmeadeenthusiast
Egyptian Statue of a deified individual covered with magic spells and deities. Date: c. c. 672-342 BC.
Last year, the lead singer of The 1975, Matt Healy, managed to offend a whole lot of Gaelgoirí (Irish speakers) when he appeared to mock a fan’s name – Dervla – at a meet-and-greet.
Healy isn’t alone, though, when it comes to anglophone bafflement at Irish names. A recent study based on an analysis of Google searches revealed the words that British people have the most difficulty pronouncing. The names Aoife, Saoirse, Niamh and Siobhán occupy places in the top 10.
And it’s not exclusively a British problem: I always cringe watching US talkshows where the host quizzes their Irish guest (usually Saoirse Ronan) on the pronunciation of their and other Irish names.
I’ve heard every possible variation of my own name from non-Irish people. It’s not uncommon in Ireland; in secondary school, there were four Niamhs in my class. But I rarely come across an English person who is familiar with it, despite the proximity of our two countries.
In case you don’t know, it’s pronounced “Neev” or “Nee-av”, either is perfectly acceptable. The prefix Ní means “daughter of”. My surname is trickier, and has even tripped up a few Irish people; it can be translated as Herbert, and is pronounced “her-a-vard”.
When I was living in London, I quickly learned that saying Niamh at the counter in a coffee shop or over the phone to make a booking simply wouldn’t fly. This led to the invention of what I call my “Starbucks name”. Anything easily pronounceable with a simple spelling would do. Mia, Sophie and Rose were among my common aliases.
Speaking to others reveals a litany of similar experiences. Aoibhe Ní Shúilleabháin, a designer and teacher, spent two years at college in England having her name mispronounced and disrespected. (Her first name is pronounced “Ay-vah”.) More than one lecturer resorted to calling her “blondie”.
She tells me: “I was asked to say, ‘Three hundred and thirty three trees’” – a tongue-twister that does the rounds on TikTok – “more often than I was asked to repeat my name.” She recalls the lack of interest when she attempted to explain that Irish and English are different languages with different pronunciation rules.
Clearly, the sensitivities at play here are rooted in history: Ireland was colonised by the English and our national language was all but wiped out. A language revival began in earnest in the 19th century, but it’s never quite recovered. Ireland’s most recent census shows that about 40% of Ireland’s population can speak Irish. The English destroyed our language once before, so every little throwaway comment and scoff at our names hurts a little bit more – and ultimately becomes just tiresome. A handful of people even remark, “Oh! I didn’t know Ireland had its own language,” when I tell them about my name.
Writer Darach Ó Séaghdha is all too familiar with these difficulties. (The “rach” in Darach is pronounced like “Bach”, he says.)He hosted a podcast called Motherfoclóir, a podcast about the Irish language and culture, and whenever there were guests on with Irish names, “inevitably the episode would turn into group therapy”. There was one bad experience, he recalls, when he was told that his surname “looked like a wifi password”. But he decided to give his children Irish names, too. It’s a common trend, he says, “because parents with Irish names have been battle-hardened”.
Like the others I spoke to for this piece, writer and director Rioghnach (think “Ree-nock”)Ní Ghrioghair believes that a sense of superiority among English speakers is to blame for the constant mistreatment of Irish names. But she’s defiant. “We are going to scrutinise the British for any transgression regarding the pronunciation of our names,” and other things, she tells me, like British media claiming Irish actors as their own during awards seasons.
There is no easy crash-course I can give to you on the pronunciation of Irish names, but you can always try out “how to pronounce”-style websites (which themselves can be contested). But the simplest and most reliable solution is perhaps just to politely ask an Irish person – and listen attentively to what they say. I may have accepted that English people are very rarely going to get my name right on the first go, but I appreciate a well-intentioned effort. Just don’t laugh at it, please.
bowsersex-deactivated20220424
bowsersex
I’d like to wish all my followers a very happy Down With Cis Day.
A quite insightful quote from Stormy Daniels.
[Text ID: We are thought of as less than people. When every story about me broke, it was “porn star Stormy Daniels, real name X,” and they printed my real name everywhere. Every time you see Whoopi Goldberg’s name, or Nicolas Cage or Bruno Mars, they don’t put their real name in parentheses behind it. I had so many female journalists do it to me. And when I said something to them, [they’d say,] “Say her name. Say her name. Her name is Stephanie Clifford, say it! She’s not just porn star Stormy Daniels!” But they never paused to think that maybe that’s the name I wanted. And you just outed my family. I guarantee you wouldn’t misgender me, so why would you use a dead name? And they thought they were doing the right thing because they’re on their big high feminist fucking #MeToo horse and they never even stopped to do the most basic feminist thing, which is ask the woman in the center of the storm what she wants to be called. And nobody did it. /End ID]
Fun fact! When I was googling to find this citation to make it easier to add the text id, google auto-completed "Stormy Daniels" to "Stormy Daniels real name" with her full legal name in giant letters right below the question!
There's also this very insightful bit from her right before the above passage:
"One of the things I want to do, because of what happened to me in court, is to use [my] platform to lobby to change the rule about being able to discriminate against sex workers. Because as a director, all these years in the business, I saw so many girls come in and not want to be stars. They just wanted to make money to go to school, and they didn’t buy purses, they didn’t do drugs, they didn’t party, they didn’t do anything fucking stupid, right? I really got to know these women on a personal level because I was directing at least once a month for 10 years. And so I saw these girls come in, do everything right, get a degree in nursing, leave the business—but then a year or two years later, they’d come back because they got fired over and over and over because they got recognized at work.
And when they came back, that’s when they were broken. That’s when they did drugs. That’s when they died. That’s when I saw them commit suicide, not the first time around. I can name 50 girls right now who have gotten fired because they used to do porn. And that’s got to change and [the rape shield carve-out] has to change. And what they did to me has to change. Because it’s bullshit. You don’t want us to do porn, but you won’t let us do anything else."
What she says: im fine
What she means: the average age of conception over the past 250k years is apparently 26.9. Let's round it down to 25. Think of your birth mother. Hold her hand. Imagine her holding hands with her mother. Within 4 people, you're back in time 100 years, and it's an intimate family dinner. Just after WWI. Add another 16 people, a small party of 20, and you're in the 1500s. Double it, twice, and you're at 80 people. Your family would fill a restaurant, and you're at the height of the Roman empire. At 100 people, Confucius is alive but Socrates has not yet been born. 100 people. That's a medium sized wedding. A small lecture theatre or concert. 200 people, probably the biggest party i could ever hope to host, takes you back 5000 years. The guests at your soirée of parents would be contemporaries of the Egyptian and Indus Valley civilisations, although you'd probably be too busy fixing drinks and nibbles to talk to all of them. Just imagine it. 200 of you. That's all it takes to get back 5,000 years. And we could go further. 1000 people, a decent sized concert, a large high school, and we're at the end of the last ice age. Your ancestors are comparing their pink floyd vinyl with music played on instruments carved from wood or bones of long vanished species. Wander through the crowd. See your own features and phrases and gestures refract out like a kaleidoscope. What would they make of you? What do you make of them? Why does it feel so unfair that even that first 100 years --that small family dinner of four--is out of your grasp? Maybe it's because questions of spatial distance have become negligible to us now. why, oh why, does time hold out against us so stubbornly
New research by Just Like Us has found that [UK] lesbians are the most likely of the whole LGBTQ+ community to be supportive of trans people. Lesbians are the most likely to say they know a trans person (92%), and also the most likely to say they are “supportive” or “very supportive” of trans people (96%). That’s compared to 89% of LGBTQ+ people overall, and just 69% of non-LGBTQ+ people.
… as a lesbian, I see so much overlap with the experiences we and trans communities encounter in the heterosexist world we live in. Particularly, as a butch lesbian, I know that we are both used to living in the margins, to not having our identities respected or understood. Lesbians and trans people stand side by side – we always have done and always will. And this isn’t just my opinion, the research shows this is the case too.
So when you hear or read a nasty, false stereotype about lesbians being anti-trans, I hope you’ll be able to see it for what it is: a lesbopobic trope.
… Transphobia is rising at an alarming rate in our society. I find it surreal when people fail to see the parallels between the tactics of promoting homophobia and the fear of the unknown used against us in the past, and the ways that trans people are being talked about today.
This article doesn’t name who is spreading this lesbophobic trope: TERFs. Claiming to speak for lesbians is just one more way is which TERFs pretend to be a bigger group than they actually are, and one more way in which they try to falsely claim marginalization, obscuring that they are largely just the usual white middle&upper class straight conservatives, misappropriating the word ‘feminist’ to peddle their usual bigotry.
The next time you see a British TERF claiming to speak for lesbians, please remind them that 96% of lesbians disagree.
Jennifer Coolidge is the only person alive who could believably play a live action miss piggy, in this essay i will
What if the toys in toy story went to a catholic woman’s house and all of her figurines of crucified jesus started screaming out in endless pain whenever she left the room
"'I pardon him, as God shall pardon me,'" said the Emperor. "Come, swear your loyalty, my son—my brother—beloved—Lyctor—saint."
Rereading for Mercy scenes made me get inspired from this bit
cosmictisane
these are still the most hilarious
lmao god, english upper class people... I was reading Mathilda, and there's all these monologues about the protagonist going insane from loneliness and not knowing how to act when she finally strikes up a friendship again; she has retired to a cottage in the woods and is essentially in hiding. All this time we're given the impression that she is utterly alone in that cottage. Much woe about the completeness of her loneliness. and then.
what do you mean your servant ...? in your cottage in the woods where you were so utterly alone? that one?
pt 2, this time Frankenstein by the same. Said Frankenstein is greatly relieved when he returns and the 'apartment was empty' because this means his monster has fled. but then
...did that servant materialise out of thin air to bring him food in his room. The place not actually empty, just empty of people of his own class. he just left the servant and his monster with each other while he was out.
Eventually the monster was like "well this is awkward. I'm out." and the servant presumably just filed the encounter under "weird shit upper class people do" and went on with his life.
I remember taking this college elective on film adaptations and we talked about the controversy caused by the PBS adaptation of Emma, which made a point of putting servants in every. single. scene, confronting the audience with the reality that the main characters are surrounded by servants constantly and are choosing not to acknowledge their presence. Emma is consoling her "poor" friend Harriet over her misfortune and the entire time a servant is standing there silently brushing Emma's hair or some shit. Virtually every other adaptation of Emma does a very good job of invisiblizing the constant presence of the working class labor force that allowed these people to live the way they did.
If anyone is interested the murder mystery Gosford Park specifically explored this phenomenon. Roger Ebert did a review of it here.
chapter one of Carmilla, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu