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Felt cute, might erase the future

@dagny-hashtaggart

I am the top kek. I am the bottom lel. I am the alpha and the omega. I am often bitches but in this particular case I am not.

That category of “character that fanartists and cosplayers tend to render as blonde at least half the time even though they’re canonically not.”

The one who’s coming immediately to mind is Dulcinea Septimus from The Locked Tomb, but there are others.

Late imperial Russian newspapers would sometimes have a guy whose job was “responsible editor,” meaning the one who would get arrested when the paper was shut down. Feel like I’d be p good at that one

Probably where How I Met Your Mother stole that plot point for Barney from

What a show... Totally managed to erase itself from pop culture as it ended. Quite the accomplishment!

Eh, GoT ended 4 years ago this week

GoT tops it with gap between peak and crashing down after. Avatar also apparently disappears between installments

I don't think GoT erased itself from pop culture at all! People aren't going around showcasing the failures of HIMYM while simultaneously trying to find the next one. People still consider GoT a good franchise idea ruined in execution. But the whole space for shows like HIMYM seems to have collapsed. (Confidence: Low. I don't actually watch current shows myself, I just pick stuff up via osmosis.)

The very fact that people routinely cite GoT as a show that fucked the landing so badly it erased itself from pop culture overnight suggests it erased itself less effectively than HIMYM did.

Something something “the worst pirate I’ve ever heard of.”

Learning that part of Elizabeth Holmes' megalomania was making everyone read "The Alchemist" making me ask:

If you were an egomaniacal tech startup entrepreneur, what book would you foist upon your minions?

I feel like going proper obscure would probably be somewhat incompatible with success as an egomaniacal startup entrepreneur, so in the spirit of going with something fairly well-known like Coelho’s book, I’ll say The Name of The Rose.

Trying desperately to come up with an answer that's an actual book but deep down I know that it would absolutely have to be Homestuck.

Also a valid answer.

Late imperial Russian newspapers would sometimes have a guy whose job was “responsible editor,” meaning the one who would get arrested when the paper was shut down. Feel like I’d be p good at that one

perpetually amazed at how gentrification discourse begins from the relatively sympathetic situation of long-time renters being priced out of their own community, with a tight relationship to urban poverty and destructive housing policy, and somehow still ends up being 95% indistinguishable from generic "there goes the neighbourhood" NIMBYism

Also, and this is germane to nothing but the topic of Malcolm X more broadly, but I remember being pretty shocked when I found out that he was a redhead.

Contemporary American racial politics on both sides are pretty big on rigid distinctions between black and white, but I think it’s important to remember that for most of our history someone with a white grandfather, with light brown skin and a pretty damn white guy hair color, could nevertheless be seen consistently as on the black side of the racial divide when it came to Jim Crow laws and various forms of de facto segregation.

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He was a redhead?

Dark red, but yeah. It’s pretty apparent in color photos of him.

Also this is reminding me of a conversation I had about The Autobiography of Malcolm X with a prospective student at my alma mater when I was most of the way through my course of undergraduate study in which she expressed shock at the thought of someone being high on morphine, cocaine, and cannabis at the same time, and I said nothing.

That strikes me as a pretty weird combination

I mean it was probably somewhat less weird when morphine was readily available as a street drug; for the most part it’s been replaced by dilaudid, fentanyl, heroin, etc. these days. But uppers + downers + weed is pretty fun.

I think one of the reasons drag kings aren’t as popular as drag queens, aside from the fact that straight women don’t like us, is that people are uncomfortable acknowledging masculinity as a performance. Like we as a society know that femininity is a performance, with its own costumes and rules. Masculinity is also a performance, and nothing makes that more clear than someone making an exaggeration of it

Yeah, I think there’s a markedness gap. Everyone knows someone wearing a dress is being a girl (with all the opprobrium that attaches to that if the person has a beard, a dick, too much musculature, hell a lot of the things that make you Wrong To Wear A Dress are things cis women can do too), and if they’re not supposed to be a girl then the normies can all point and jeer, but there’s this weird liminality to people wearing suits.

Also, and this is germane to nothing but the topic of Malcolm X more broadly, but I remember being pretty shocked when I found out that he was a redhead.

Contemporary American racial politics on both sides are pretty big on rigid distinctions between black and white, but I think it’s important to remember that for most of our history someone with a white grandfather, with light brown skin and a pretty damn white guy hair color, could nevertheless be seen consistently as on the black side of the racial divide when it came to Jim Crow laws and various forms of de facto segregation.

I don’t even think it’s all that great a novel, but for establishing context at least, I feel like more people should read Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, a satire in which two otherwise identical babies, one of whom is 1/32 black, get swapped at birth.

Also, and this is germane to nothing but the topic of Malcolm X more broadly, but I remember being pretty shocked when I found out that he was a redhead.

Contemporary American racial politics on both sides are pretty big on rigid distinctions between black and white, but I think it’s important to remember that for most of our history someone with a white grandfather, with light brown skin and a pretty damn white guy hair color, could nevertheless be seen consistently as on the black side of the racial divide when it came to Jim Crow laws and various forms of de facto segregation.

Also this is reminding me of a conversation I had about The Autobiography of Malcolm X with a prospective student at my alma mater when I was most of the way through my course of undergraduate study in which she expressed shock at the thought of someone being high on morphine, cocaine, and cannabis at the same time, and I said nothing.

Placeholder: I have complicated opinions about Alex Haley and Malcolm X (both individually and collectively) that I don’t think I’m entirely capable of articulating while drunk

Fuck it, the basics that can assimilate some nuance in the morning are: The Autobiography of Malcolm X is very much a work of propaganda, and I don’t think it’s primarily Alex Haley’s propaganda (though he’s probably in there somewhere). Malcolm X very much consciously portrayed himself as an ironic all-American success story, who found God (if not the God of mainstream Christian America) in prison after being a drug-addicted lost soul in his youth, and rose to be a pillar of the community (but again, a community that mainstream America wasn’t comfortable with, and that challenged mainstream American values). I think this was very much a conscious portrayal on Malcolm X’s part, and one that’s visible in his speeches and evangelistic work for the Nation of Islam well before he and Haley started talking in 1963, though probably Haley did refine it some. I think both Malcolm X and MLK were substantially shrewder than a lot of the modern conceptions of both of them gives them credit for.

(This was most directly brought to my mind by claims that Haley fabricated conversations with Martin Luther King, Jr. that were critical of Malcolm X, and I don’t really have a strong reason as yet to judge for or against that claim, or the claim that Haley plagiarized parts of Roots, but I do feel pretty skeptical of claims that Haley was putting his own words in Malcolm X’s mouth in the Autobiography.)

(Also Roots is at minimum a pretty good novel, claims of fact aside.)

Placeholder: I have complicated opinions about Alex Haley and Malcolm X (both individually and collectively) that I don’t think I’m entirely capable of articulating while drunk