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."

I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got payed to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.

So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."

I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?

It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.

Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.

So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.

i love how saren just zooms around on a hoverboard in mass effect 1 and then we never see anything like that again for the rest of the trilogy

marie howe, in an interview with krista tippett of on being

https://www.sciencealert.com

My name is cow And when I see A scientist Paint stripes on me I look so hip And sleek and fit And best of all I don’t get bit

since I already reblogged about it here's a less informal, more concise way of putting it:

THE INTERNET ARCHIVE IS NOT GOING TO DIE. ONLY CERTAIN BOOKS ARE AT STAKE NOTHING ELSE. DONATE WHAT YOU CAN FOR THEIR COURT COSTS. THEY STILL HAVE AN APPEAL TO GIVE

It is important, however, to note that, should this situation settle with TIA completely losing the fight, that it sets a precedent: Copyright abusers can go after Internet Archive.

This has happened before and gone both ways - the reason we have videogame emulation as it stands right now (completely absent of cost and done purely out of love, admiration, and a desire for preservation) is because the company Bleem won in court against Sony over the topic of emulation.

The reason Music Copyright has been so tumultuous and pro-copyright owner is because dozens of Record Labels went after (and beat) companies like Limewire.

This is not a slippery slope - give companies with too much money an inch in court, and they'll take all they can get.

You need to help in any way possible

in the latest cyber-news: the internet archive has lost their case against 4 major publishing houses (verge article). they’re going to appeal, but this is still a bad outcome. the fate of the internet is currently hanging in the balance because 4 multibillionare publishing groups missed out on like $15 of combined revenue during the pandemic because of the archive’s online library service. it’s so fucking stupid.

for those who don’t know what the internet archive is, it’s a virtual library full of media. books, magazines, recordings, visuals, flash games, websites - a lot of these things either don’t exist anymore or cannot be found & bought. heard of the wayback machine? that’s part of the internet archive. it is the most important website to exist, and i don’t say that lightly. if the internet archive goes down, the cultural loss will be immeasurable.

so how can you help?

and finally…

cannot stress enough that donating to the internet archive to help them appeal this without going broke is the most important thing you can do right now. my day job revolves around fulfilling digital article and book scan requests at an academic library and a huge part of that is borrowing from other libraries that do controlled digital lending (incl. the internet archive!). copyright law is already hugely restrictive on what we can and can't lend, and we absolutely don't have the option to pirate anything for our patrons due to being a large academic institution. it's difficult to overstate just how bad this ruling could end up being for libraries that have digital lending programs, esp ones that rely on CDR for old/archival/hard-to-find texts.

Sims 4 becoming transpositive has led to some of the funniest UI elements I’ve ever seen

everyone loves Predynastic Egyptian Terracotta Bowl with Human Feet. shout-out to a real one

people r so weird about the idea of being straight passing like. loads of queer couples pass as straight, either in the eyes of the general straight public or Legally or both, for various reasons (eg. same gender relationship where one person is trans and hasnt had their legal name or gender marker changed, a relationship btwn two nonbinary people whose legal status and/or gender presentation allows cis straight people to assume they are also cis and straight, the dreaded two cis bi people who are gender conforming enough to not freak straight people out, etc, etc) and this generally sucks a lot while also conferring material advantages. which often feel very bad to have, but you still have them. thats what "passing" as any dominant group entails. it doesn't make you a bad person. existing in that state of conditional acceptance where you can access certain benefits at the cost of having your real self obscured from people who will revoke those benefits the second they find out the truth is, like, ethically neutral. it's shithead behaviour to try to use as an insult or gotcha and its unhelpful to deny that it applies to any queer people--both of those things imply that if you DO pass as straight then you are actually functionally straight. which obviously is not true!!! come on

btw u are absolutely welcome to reblog this but if you tag it "q-slur" i will block u xxxx

Shadows of Rose RESIDENT EVIL VILLAGE (2021) dev. Capcom

Genuinely can’t stand the new favouritism towards video format. You want me to spend a whole two minutes listening to someone say out loud a paragraph I could read in 20 seconds?

(This is about tiktok. I hate tiktok.)

It’s not just tiktok, it’s everything. I’m tired of clicking on news articles and instead finding it’s a video I have to watch. I’m tired of being sent to a video when I want to learn about a new thing instead of an article I can skim in less than a minute. You mean you want me to sit through an entire video, listening for the one kernel of information that’s buried in there that I’m interested in? Nah, man, life is too short to waste it like that. I don’t know why any of you like videos lmao.

Happiness Will Come To You.

when tho

When You Least Expect It. Probably Late March

reblog for happiness to come for you in late march!

I reblogged this last year and I hung out with blink-182 backstage on March 30. Reblogging again because it worked the first time.

honestly, last year one of the best days of my life happened in late March

omw to write a story consisting solely of my favorite tropes and characters i think are cool

ULTIMATE DILF DEATH FIGHT

in association with the wildly popular (to me and my friends) ultimate milf bracket, i present to you the ultimate dilf championship. i was not personally offended by any dilf discourse. i just think they are neat.

please submit your takes on the ultimate dilf. multiple entries are encouraged and the freakier the better, in my opinion. the entries will be judged by a panel of gays who don't have any strong dilf feelings, so you know it will be fair.

winner will be crowned king of the dilf arena

SOME POINTS:

so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god

okay so i just got my dream job??? a week after applying to it?? and now i’m thinking….maybe this is the good luck post

…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment

likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post

i need all the help i can get for finals

Hey so

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

This might be the real one, y’all.

let’s hear it for james vega/captain tony imo.  mutual pining… vega respects the captain too much to hit on him at work.. tony’s too much of a professional and cares too much about the welfare of his people to pursue an inappropriate relationship with an immediate subordinate while they’re on the job, let alone fucking deployed and fighting collectors.. long hours training together, night watches spent talking, lighting each others’ cigarettes, never quite touching.  then that mission, just a few people left out of the whole squad, james dragging tony into cover, trying to put medigel on the massive abdominal wound.  tony grabs his hand.

“get them out of here, lieutenant,” he says.

james is freaking out, “no, no, i can’t do this without you – ”

“yeah you can, james.  yeah, you can.”

and then he dies in vega’s arms.

james survives the mission.  he loses almost all of what’s left of the squad.  and they promote him for it.